ChemCollective Virtual Lab vs Maroon

ChemCollective Virtual Lab is an online chemistry simulation that connects calculations with laboratory-style experiments. Students and educators can use its web activities without licensing requirements, including experiments with hundreds of standard aqueous reagents across acid-base chemistry, thermochemistry, solubility, and redox topics. Teaching resources include prepared lab problems, tutorials, courses, real-world scenarios, visualizations, simulations, and concept tests. Autograded activities randomize unknowns and check answers, with hints and feedback. Teachers can make free classroom pages that collect activity links, instructions, and handouts, and track attempts on autograded problems. Instructors may modify activities or request custom ones. Downloadable versions for Windows and Mac are available, though Java may be needed. The project aims to help high school and college students approach chemistry like practicing scientists. Its current scope is aqueous reactions. The Virtual Lab is free for educators and students; the site and its contents are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

Maroon is a free, open-source immersive physics laboratory for interactive learning, simulations, and experiments. In its virtual environment, users approach a station and teleport to a room containing the related lesson or activity. Simulations emphasize active learning by involving students in the process. Listed physics activities include Coulomb’s Law, Falling Coil, Faraday’s Law, Huygens’ Principle, Point Wave, Pendulum, Van de Graaff, and Optics. The lab also includes titration and sorting experiments, and supports experiment authoring. In the optics activity, users adjust parameters and receive real-time visual feedback while exploring reflection, refraction, lenses, and fiber optics. Maroon runs in a browser and has downloadable Windows PC and virtual-reality versions. Developed with Unity at Graz University of Technology, the project is hosted on GitHub and welcomes contributions, issue reports, and pull requests. Students can contribute functionality, VR experiences, learning experiences, and physics experiments.