Designing a Virtual Chemistry Experiment with Claude for Middle School: Exploring Hydrangea Flower Color Modification

This study designs an instructional activity aimed at engaging ninth-grade students in meaningful learning by guiding them to apply their existing chemical knowledge of acids, bases, and salts to solve real-world problems related to modifying the color of hydrangea flowers. This activity aims to deepen students’ understanding of how soil pH affects the color expression in hydrangea flowers. Due to the time-consuming and complex nature of the hands-on experiment, a virtual experiment was developed as an alternative. However, existing virtual laboratories developed by educational technology companies primarily focus on textbook-based experiments and do not include a hydrangea color modification experiment. To address this limitation, this study explores the use of Claude Sonnet 4, a version of the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool Claude, known for its coding proficiency, to create an online virtual experiment interface that does not require advanced coding skills from teachers. This approach provides teachers with a new way to design personalized virtual experiments independently that better meet their diverse instructional needs. The observed student performance reflected active engagement in higher-order thinking and an increase in interest in both the activity itself and the application of GenAI tools in the design of virtual chemistry experiments.