Droplet-Based Educational Kit for Young Students: Hands-On Experiments from Precipitation Reactions to Magnetic Drug Delivery

Abstract

For high school students, we have created an educational drug delivery kit based on a magnetically sensitive hydrogel (ferrogels). To make it easier for educators to conduct the experiments in a classroom, we concentrated on designing this kit with the simplest reactions and the least amount of equipment. Students learn some common fundamentals in drug delivery, polymer chemistry, and materials science through this course, which is implemented through the POGIL approach as an active learning method. Students’ curiosity in the therapeutic uses of materials is piqued, and they acquire laboratory skills in chemistry via these three-step experiments included in the kit. In addition to learning the basic principles of each experiment, the steps of the experiments take 5–7 h. In the first step, students synthesize Pb(I)₂, Fe(OH)₂, Fe(OH)₃, and Fe₃O₄ via double replacement precipitation and coprecipitation reactions. This enables students to learn the concepts of these kinds of reactions through simple and attractive experiments. Students make the alginate hydrogel beads in the second part by adding an alginate solution to an aqueous solution of CaCl₂ gradually. Lastly, by mixing Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles into the CaCl₂ solution and alginate-D solution containing food dye as a simulated drug, students learn how to create magnetic drug delivery vehicles. The “post-test-only matched control group design” was employed with 50 11th-grade high school students, who were randomly divided into two experimental and control groups. Consequences show that the POGIL-based kit’s training produced noticeably higher test scores compared to the control group, which received traditional chemically designed education. Also, the level of student satisfaction with the above method was 86%.