Notes
This is a smaller part of a large project aimed at preparing second year undergraduate chemistry students for lab-based practicals. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted access to laboratories to a large extent in 2020 and 2021, resulting in reduced confidence in the lab setting. The aim of the project is to produce materials to familiarise students with the lab itself, unfamiliar equipment, and provide opportunities to rehearse procedures for sodium borohydride reduction. The project is funded by a collaborative innovation grant, and employs two student developers to co-design learning material.
This element of the work is a tour of the rotary evaporator – a piece of equipment that students will likely not have used before. On-site reference photos and videos were made to show the different functions and operations of the machine. Using these reference materials alongside schematics and information from the manufacturer’s manual, I created and textured a custom 3D model in Blender. I animated elements of the model, and rendered a mixture of still images and video files.
I created the final interface and information panels in Articulate Storyline.
The tour
The tour comprises an initial screen that highlights the purpose of each part of the navigation, followed by five angled views of the rotary evaporator model, and operating instructions.
The tour is freely navigable by the user, and each screen shows information markers for points of interest that the learner needs to be aware of before operating the equipment. Clicking on these markers provides further information and safety tips, plus high quality renders of the specific section, or animations showing related actions. These can be replayed as many times as the learner finds useful.
The operating instructions part of the tour provide a step-by-step written guide, and looping animated gifs showing each action. The progress from step-to-step is controlled by the learner, and they can replay through the whole instruction set as needed.
3D viewer
This Sketchfab viewer shows the Rotary Evaporator model as a 3D object that you can pan around and zoom into. It is largely accurate, but the image-based textures are not present.