Marvin JS is a novel light-weight chemical editor suitable for generating standard chemical structures without the need for installing Java, designed by ChemAxon. It provides all the essential features for quick and easy structure drawing as well as flexible editing options for molecular manipulations. Pearson Education is partnering with ChemAxon to develop a custom educational version of Marvin JS to be used in Pearson’s chemical tutorial platform, MasteringChemistry. This educational version of Marvin JS separates out various tools into “presets” to match specific answer types that Pearson authors have designed – skeletal 2D problems, skeletal 3D problems and mechanism problems. For example, tools necessary for drawing mechanisms will only be available for those problems that ask the student to draw a mechanism. In additional, authors will be able to set specific initialization parameters for individual problems such as “show lone pairs” or “show R,S labels”. This higher level of feature control allows authors to better regulate what students are able to see and able to do in the drawing tool, minimizing opportunities for mistakes (using the wrong templates for example) or cheating (using R,S labels to answer a stereochemistry question). Pearson will offer this custom version of Marvin JS for Organic and General Chemistry drawing items both for desktop and for mobile beginning in January 2014.

1. MarvinJS goes to College
J Zane Barlow PhD, Product Manager
Margaret Trombley, Content Lead
Prasanth Buchi, Development Lead
Jeanne Zalesky, Editor in Chief
Pearson Education
Drawing tool for MasteringChemistry

2. MasteringChemistry:
389,788 registrations
Mastering:
Over 1.7 million registrations

3. The Power of Mastering
Using specific evaluators,
authors can write targeted
feedback geared toward
specific student answers.

4. The Power of Mastering
Feedback can also be authored
for more general criteria
And there is also system
generated feedback for basic
drawing issues.

5. Hints step students
through the problem.
Socratic hints guide
students much like
instructor office hours.
Driving Learning

6. Marvin for JavaScript
A user friendly tool for quick and
convenient drawing of chemical
structures and mechanisms.
Student benefits:
▪ New user friendly interface
▪ Mobile compatible
▪ Faster load times
▪ No JAVA!

7. Customized
▪ Skeletal2D, Skeletal3D, Mechanism
▪ Ability to control showing:
▪ Lone pairs
▪ Valence errors
▪ C and/or H
▪ R,S labels
Toolbars specific to answer type

8. Usability: Challenge of drawing electron flows
1. Subtle mouse movements
radically alter the electron flow
that’s created
2. No consistent visual cues of
what bond is created (difficult
to determine why submission
is wrong)
3. Students draw electron flow
from atoms not electrons,
which can lead to
misconception
In MarvinSketch:

9. Improvements to Electron Flow in MarvinJS
or
After drawing initial
electron flow arrow,
student clicks to specify
the correct bond.
Students select
electron(s) when
showing flow.
Dotted line maintains
visual confirmation of
bond.

10. Basic System Architecture - MarvinJS/Mastering
Mastering
Server
Jchem
Webservice
Marvin JS
Webservice
Requests
Marvin JS
Webservice
Requests
Evaluation
Requests
Evaluation
Requests
Tomcat Server
Apache
Web
Server
Marvin JS UI
ACE
Evaluator
Code
Jchem
Library
Ochem Service

11. Next steps: Lewis drawing
Unpaired and lone-pairs of
electrons manually added and
graded
Hydrogen atoms
manually added and
graded
Brackets available
for ionic species
Extend use of MarvinJS to all answer types in MasteringChemistry.

12. Next steps: Synthesis Problems
Indicate reaction
conditions
Products of
each step,
rather than
electron flow
This answer type would enhance use in 2nd semester Organic Chemistry.

13. Current Workaround: Synthesis maps
Students add
precursors

14. Marvin for JavaScript
For more information, please contact
J. Zane Barlow (zane.barlow@pearson.com)