Colina Verde Secondary School,  Macau SAR, China

Abstract: Abstract: After the revision of the Basic Competence Requirements for junior secondary Natural Sciences in Macau in 2024, greater emphasis is placed on scientific thinking, scientific inquiry and integrated application; schools are also permitted, under the Local Curriculum Framework for Formal Education, to organize an integrated 'Natural Sciences' programme or separate 'Chemistry' as a standalone subject, allowing considerable school-based autonomy. Yet once digital tools enter the chemistry classroom, a new set of disorders tends to appear—the 'simulation is beautiful, the nose is switched off' syndrome: students can smoothly zoom in on the dissolution of NaCl in a piece of software, yet cannot say where the salty taste comes from; they finish an animation of the electrolysis of water without ever having seen a glowing splint 'puffed' awake at a test tube mouth. Writing as a frontline junior secondary chemistry teacher in Macau, this paper proposes the 'Scent-first Chemistry (senses first, particles second, symbols third)' model: digital technology does not teach equations first, but first preserves 'sensory traces'—odour cards, colour strips, the feel of temperature, recordings of bubbling; it then uses stop-motion animation and particle simulation to translate macroscopic phenomena into microscopic explanation; finally, generative AI acts as a 'misnomer alias generator', judging nothing right or wrong and only putting up the most scientist-like wrong things the class has said. Using three lesson cases—Form 1 'Air and Water', Form 2 'Acids, Bases and Salts', and Form 3 'Metals and Types of Reaction'—the paper argues that the digitization of junior secondary chemistry in Macau should not move the laboratory into the screen, but should let the screen give the laboratory's 'saltiness, sourness, heat, sound' back to the students. The model aligns with the directions of scientific literacy, school-based curriculum and the application of technological resources set out in Macau's junior secondary Natural Sciences curriculum guidelines, and can be implemented in an ordinary Macau secondary school using mobile phones, free simulators, school-based odour strips, and the existing stop-motion animation / PhET teacher-reasoning research at the University of Macau.

Keywords: Education digitization; junior secondary chemistry; sensory traces; particle model; stop-motion animation; misnomer alias generator; Macau Natural Sciences curriculum