Beyond Traditional Texts: Exploring AI as a Tool for Generating Stories and Analogies in Organic Chemistry Education

Organic chemistry is widely regarded as a challenging subject, especially for nonchemistry majors who often find it abstract and disconnected from their academic or career interests. This explanatory study investigates the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated stories and analogies─developed by the course instructor─as pedagogical tools to improve student motivation and engagement. A cohort of 52 undergraduate students majoring in pharmacy and biochemistry participated in a semester-long intervention involving AI-generated narrative preclass readings, in-class explanatory activities, and take-home storytelling assignments. Materials were tailored using ChatGPT to reflect students’ disciplinary backgrounds. Student feedback was collected through surveys, concept quizzes, and in-class observations. Student self-reports indicated that AI-generated stories were perceived as more effective than traditional instructional explanations, especially with respect to clarity, enjoyment, relevance, and memorability. Students expressed a clear preference for narrative and analogy-based formats, and many adopted these approaches in their own explanations during discussions. In-class use of AI─by both the instructor and students─enabled real-time clarification of misconceptions and supported peer-generated analogies, fostering active participation and critical thinking. In the take-home assignment on free radical halogenation, students created personalized AI-assisted stories using tailored prompts; nearly all included the full mechanistic sequence, although performance on individual substeps was more moderate, while clarity and coherence were generally strong. These findings offer preliminary evidence supporting the potential pedagogical value of AI-assisted storytelling in chemistry education, given the study’s reliance on a modest sample size and self-reported student perceptions. By enabling differentiated instruction, enhancing engagement, and making abstract content more accessible, tools like ChatGPT can serve as a powerful complement to traditional instructional strategies, especially in classrooms with diverse learners.