Enhancing Chemistry Education: Evaluating Methods for Classifying Hand-Drawn Molecules and Generating 3D Visualizations

This work presents a comparison between techniques for recognizing inorganic molecular structures from hand-drawn sketches. The approach used combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) method to classify and recognize these sketches. For the tests, we used images drawn by high school students. The comparison of the results obtained with the CNN and HOG techniques was carried out in detail. Additionally, we developed an application capable of generating three-dimensional visualizations of the molecular structures, allowing their representation in a virtual environment. This 3D visualization provides a more intuitive understanding of the molecular structures. This work highlights the effectiveness of machine learning technologies in education, by offering an accessible and interactive educational tool that complements traditional chemistry teaching. In this way, it provides students with a deeper understanding of the physical and chemical properties of inorganic molecules, enriching the learning process and making it more engaging.