Development and Testing of Chemistry Education Resources for a Mobile Phone

Despite their amazing profusion, mobile phones have not been a part of school education and there have been no reports on testing for their active use in this arena. We have thus developed chemistry resources via the Internet that allow mobile phones to be used as mobile computer terminals for educational purposes. Because mobile phone displays are extremely small, they are not suitable for viewing lengthy texts or large images over the Internet. In consideration of this limitation, we have developed chemistry resources that prioritize the greater convenience offered by mobile phones over desktop computers. We revised the "Physical Chemistry Experiment" preparation system, which was already available on the Internet, so that it could be accessed using a mobile telephone. The Physical Chemistry Experiment comprises 18 topics. Testing use of these resources began during student experiments in April, 2003, and this paper reports the results of our development efforts and the results of implementing these developments in the educational environment.