DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00511

Summary
TikTok is a social media video-based phone application which enables creative and engaging videos to be shared on social media platforms worldwide. TikTok has been applied to create fun, exciting, and engaging 15−60 s long chemistry outreach educational videos, to encourage public dissemination of science with a system thinking approach. With the creation of an online TikTok account called “The Chemistry Collective” by undergraduate students, 16 educational videos were created, with approximately 8,500 views. Upon surveying participants, viewers of these TikTok videos strongly agreed that they had learned something new about chemistry since watching these videos (4.66/5.00) and had an increased interest in chemistry (82.7% agreed). As such, TikTok can be used to enhance public and undergraduate student engagement with chemistry and science education, together with facilitating the ability of the public to understand how chemistry can be fun, can be performed at home, and is part of our daily lives.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This article deal with the use of TikTok social media as a modern tool for chemical education and outreach in combination with mobile learning and systems thinking. The proposed technology have the intriguing advantage to educate viewer and the creators of the videos at once. The use of TickTock in conjunction with systems thinking approach (including the complex system thinking) can be helpful on teaching “the importance of chemistry in research areas such as waste valorization and the circular economy, and how this tie in with tackling global issues-“ The steps proposed to reach this goal are: “(i) viewing the system (or chemistry experiments) as a whole, rather than a collection of simpler components; (ii) identifying the interconnections and feedback loops within these dynamic systems; (iii) determining the consequences of the interconnections; (iv) providing environmental, social, and economic context to these experiments; and (v) relating theoretical principles to everyday observations in student’s lives

Point of Strength
Even if this article do not deal directly with COmplex SYstem Knowledge it suggest to have a look on the media that are currently attracting the communicative interest of the students. The authors demonstrate as these technologies could be considered as efficient teaching and public outreach tools for transferring chemical knowledge using a System Thinking approach. These tools sound very interesting in this specific period in which the pandemic situation is forcing schools and university to reinvent a new style of on-line didactic.