Award for Teaching Innovations in E-learning 2019-20

As a Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, HKU for the past eight years, Dr Yuen has developed several core chemistry courses as well as Common Core Courses. She is a passionate teacher and believes that connecting students’ experience with chemistry principles is a powerful way to start a discussion about a chemical phenomenon. In particular, through discussing the chemistry principles behind everyday life, it can arouse students’ curiosity and help increase students’ sense of belonging in the process of learning.

In view of the students’ need, Dr Yuen has started a few teaching development projects in the past years to facilitate E-learning by incorporating various E-tools in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum; and to equip students with digital tools to model and visualise abstract concepts, so as to build connections to real-life issues. Dr Yuen incorporated programming skills, chemistry visualisation and modelling to the undergraduate curriculum. These E-learning initiatives are designed to tackle two major challenges of learning chemistry: 1) To understand and manipulate chemical structures in 3D spaces, so as to understand the structural-property relationships; 2) To model chemical reactivity through the understanding atomic and molecular orbitals. Dr Yuen believes that the introduction of digital tools to undergraduate education is vital for the holistic training of science students, as digital skills are recognised as important attributes of all candidates in their career or their postgraduate education irrespective of discipline.