Substances Changing: Chemical Change

These downloadable animations are part of the multimedia package Stuff and Substance, developed by the Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme (SEP). They can be used to develop the idea of chemical change as a change of substance.

The fact that substances can cease to exist with new ones being created in their place is a very challenging idea. Many students want to conserve substances which can lead them to view compounds as mixtures rather than substances in their own right. The approach in Stuff and Substance is to use ideas of atoms and substances to predict the possibility of chemical change. The drag and drop animation allows the enactment of a chemical change shown in a sequence of diagrams within the Stuff and Substance package. The second animation is a formative assessment task on recognising chemical change in terms of atom-level representations.

These video and animation files form part of the resources in the section Substances Changing in the Stuff and Substance multimedia package, which provides a series of interactive pages that can be used by teachers or students in the classroom.

Please note: From 2021, Adobe has discontinued support for Flash player and as a result some interactive files may no longer be playable. As an alternative method to accessing these files a group of volunteers passionate about the preservation of internet history have created project Ruffle (https://ruffle.rs/). Ruffle is an entirely open source project that you can download and run many interactive Flash resources. For further information regarding STEM Learning’s policy for website content, please visit our terms and conditions page.