Polychem

What Polychem is

Polychem is an interactive multimedia chemistry tutorial and simulation tool for teachers and students, focused on applied chemistry. It is aimed at senior high school and college chemistry; the maker says the program covers more than a full year's course, including high school curriculum content and more. The standalone software includes notes, interactive and exam questions, equipment and chemical process simulations, organic chemistry activities, games, demonstrations and videos. Teachers can generate tests from question types, view model answers and print tests with answers. They can edit notes and exam questions, add multiple-choice questions, and record or direct-mail results. With write privileges to disk, marks for most activities can be saved with names, dates and times. A free copy is offered for individual, class or demonstration use by teachers, students and organizations. It requires an internet connection to initialize each time it is used, but not during continued use. The download is more than 280 MB zipped and about 500 MB unzipped. The site licence costs $295, paid once. The download page says the software runs on PC and Mac up to Mac OS 10.6, and the updates page warns that Macs running OS X 10.7 cannot run it as described there.