A Roadmap to Support the Development of Chemistry Virtual Reality Learning Environments Merging Chemical Pedagogy and Educational Technology Design

The need to develop virtual reality learning environments (VRLEs) grounded in theory motivated this work that in turn provides guidelines to support chemistry VRLEs with evidence-based practices and frameworks. Herein, we describe nine frameworks that turned out to be critical for the design of a chemistry focused VRLE, paying special attention to the frameworks’ interconnectivity. Different framework components were crucial in different aspects of the content design, technology design, and content–technology integration, and throughout this article, we illustrate the application of each framework. As the main objective was to build a resource to support visual-spatial attributes, a shape recognition framework was developed to facilitate students’ abilities to recognize 3D characteristics from 2D representations inherent in VRLEs. The interconnected frameworks’ components complement and reinforce each other, creating a synergistic effect to support visuospatial thinking and representational competence in a VRLE. This process helped shape a set of recommendations aimed to guide other developers to produce pedagogically sound VRLEs.