What are
Interactive Questions for Chemistry
Interactive questions for chemistry are digital assessment and practice activities that allow students to actively engage with chemical concepts rather than passively selecting an answer. For higher education chemistry faculty, these questions are especially valuable because they enable students to draw, manipulate, and visualize chemical structures, reactions, and mechanisms—skills that are essential for success in chemistry courses but difficult to assess with traditional multiple-choice formats.
In chemistry, learning often depends on spatial reasoning and symbolic representation. Interactive questions support this by allowing students to demonstrate understanding through actions like constructing molecules, completing reaction pathways, or illustrating mechanisms. This approach helps instructors assess conceptual understanding and process, not just final answers, while giving students more meaningful practice with discipline-specific skills.
Why faculty use interactive questions in chemistry
Interactive questions make a proven difference on student outcomes. Studies have found that active learning approaches—those that require students to interact with material rather than passively listen—can improve student performance in STEM courses by an average of about 6 percentage points over traditional lecture-based instruction (2025, Journal of Chemical Education). Chemistry instructors often adopt interactive questions when they want to:
- Move beyond recall-based assessments
- Help students visualize molecular structures and reactions
- Assess procedural and conceptual understanding simultaneously
- Provide practice that mirrors how chemists actually work
- Increase student engagement with complex, abstract material
Interactive questions are particularly impactful in organic chemistry, where drawing and interpreting structures is central to learning.
Explore Chemistry Drawing questions powered by Aktiv
In Top Hat, interactive questions for chemistry are supported through Chemistry Drawing questions powered by Aktiv, now integrated into select Organic Chemistry textbooks. This tool provides an enhanced, learning-focused experience for drawing chemical structures, reactions, and mechanisms directly within course content. Unlike many other chemistry drawing tools, Chemistry Drawing questions powered by Aktiv are accessible, mobile-friendly, and designed specifically for learning chemistry.
Chemistry Drawing powered by Aktiv replaces the previous MarvinJS-based tool and is designed specifically to support student learning. Key features include:
- A hexagonal grid system that helps students accurately draw organic structures
- Support for drawing molecules, reactions, and mechanistic steps
- An interface optimized for accessibility and mobile use, unlike many traditional chemistry drawing tools
- A design purpose-built for chemistry education, not just professional diagramming
These interactive questions help students practice the exact skills they need in Organic Chemistry—visualizing structures, understanding relationships between molecules, and representing chemical processes clearly and correctly.
How to get started with interactive questions for chemistry
Chemistry Drawing questions powered by Aktiv are designed for organic chemistry courses. Chemistry Drawing questions are currently available in the following Top Hat Organic Chemistry eTexts: Organic Chemistry I & II, 2e (Steve Forsey) and Organic Chemistry: Mechanistic Patterns, 2e (Bill Ogilvie et al.). At this time, Chemistry Drawing questions cannot be authored directly by instructors. They are included as part of the integrated textbook experience.