The only program we are aware of that allows a student to draw a chemical structure in response to a question is OWL, as implemented at the Web site for McMurry’s Organic Chemistry. (This statement was true at the time of submission of this paper in mid-2004.)

I am surprised by this statement. My work on using a chemical drawing tool within WebAssign, a well known commercial online homework and grading system for chemistry and in particular for organic chemistry, has been well documented since 2001. In fact WebAssign has advertised in J. Chem. Educ. since June 2004.

For instance, I have given published presentations on my use of the JME Molecular Editor within WebAssign at CONFCHEM (online, October 2001), the 53rd SERMACS meeting at Savannah in October of 2001, as well as at the 225th ACS meeting at New Orleans in March of 2003. I am now in my 5th year of teaching using this tool.

At these three venues I showed how the Java applet enables students to draw and submit organic structures within the JME editor window while receiving immediate feedback as to the correctness of the submitted structure. It is also possible to code the answer key within WebAssign to provide guided feedback, although that was not done at the time. After the due date for an assignment is past, students can access the correct structure coded in the answer key.

The editor generates a SMILES string which is compared to the answer key SMILES string. The SMILES strings produced are stereochemistry sensitive (cis- is distinguished from trans-, (R)- is distinguished from (S)-) when such considerations are warranted.

My questions have been published by WebAssign and are available to any organic instructor who wishes to use them. My questions have been correlated to the relevant chapters for several leading organic chemistry textbooks in WebAssign.

Literature Cited

1. Chamala, Raghu Ram; Ciochina, Roxana; Grossman, Robert B.; Finkel, Raphael A.; Kannan, Saravana; Ramachandran, Prasanth. J. Chem. Educ. 2006, 83, 164-169.