Yes, my first words today in AP chemistry.
"Please, take out your phones."
"Find the 19-second video on the railroad car implosion and watch it."
Which, of course, my students easily did.
It was SO much easier than setting up my computer, connecting to the projector, and finding the video myself. Within 5 minutes, everyone had watched the video over and over, and had marveled at the speed at which the railroad car imploded.
We then had a classroom discussion about how and why this event happened.
We discussed atmospheric pressure and how big a number 1.0 atm actually is. This is when I use 14.7 pounds per square inch to put atmospheric pressure in perspective. I tell them if I had gained an extra 15 pounds during Christmas break, it would be pretty obvious that I had enjoyed a lot of cookies over break! But that pressure is the amount of force on every single inch of their body, all the time. Students start to understand that we are swimming in an ocean of air particles.
With guidance, each class explained why the tanker car was crushed. I then performed the can-crushing demo in class. Even at the super slow motion available on phones now, the can implodes amazingly fast.
It was a great day in class today.
OChemPrep
Detailing chemistry, teaching, running, and coaching. Not necessarily in that order. Always passionate.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Sunday, September 21, 2014
The Chairs! game: a history
Like many organic chemistry instructors and professors, I
teach the conformational isomers concept, Newman projections and cyclohexane
chairs, in the first few weeks of organic chemistry. I also tell my students
that this idea is truly esoteric. They
are now part of the select ‘brethren’ for whom rotation around carbon-carbon
single bonds is valued.
Yes, esoteric, but also yes, important. This is an
introduction to learning about projections and taking three-dimensional models
and flattening them into two-dimensions. They need to be able to draw and, more
importantly, see and understand these drawings. This skill is not emphasized in
previous chemistry classes, so for them this visual-spatial concept is very
difficult. It will also come back to haunt students later, such as with
elimination reactions.
So, how could I possibly make a game of this rather obscure
chemistry concept?!
I have been playing ‘The Chair Game’ for years at my white
board. I draw two big ‘chairs’ on the board, and point to the carbon vertices
and say either up/down or axial/equatorial, and the class has to respond,
together. It’s fun, different, a bit silly, and gets students involved.
I used this white board game as a model for the first
OChemPrep game. A fabulous former student, an MIT-sophomore, and I put together
a JavaScript version in the summer of 2013. She was toying with coding and I
was playing with e-learning. I used this online game with my summer ‘boot camp’
students that summer.
From there, I decided to devise a bunch of other game
concepts and presented these ideas to a local consulting firm that helps tech
start-ups get off the ground. My good friend, Carl, is a partner in this very
appropriately named firm called, Brilliant Chemistry, or BC. They helped me build
the game mechanics and design of the most expansive idea, based on mechanisms. That
game is truly breath-taking and beautiful, but, oh, SO expensive to code and develop.
So, I kept coming back to the Chair game. I could afford
Chairs.
I had another fabulous student, also now at MIT, do the
preliminary coding for a touch screen version of Chairs during his senior
project. I paid BC to help him with this project. But there is only so much a
high school senior can accomplish during a short 5-week internship project.
My co-founder, Joe, and I have put together this Chair game over
the last few months. He’s the game guy and I am the chemistry lady. We work
great together. I teach him chemistry, he teaches me game design.
I knew there was something special when I could not stop
playing the beta-version of our game in August during vacation. I kept telling
my husband, it was all part of testing and development. (Yeah, yeah.) Once we added the cool bluesy music track, it
got even more addictive.
So now we have great game with 13 levels. (Joe just told me
about level 13, I thought it stopped at 12.) My top score after hours of play-time
is 150. I have cracked level 10, but no further. I freak out a bit when I get beyond
120 points and start making mistakes.
I did a classroom trial with my 40 or so organic chemistry
students. All of them had a traditional lesson during which I introduced the
cyclohexane concept. They also had access to my set of videos. They were
divided them into two sub-groups—those who could play the game before the next
class and those that could not. I gave them all a four-point quiz about
cyclohexane substituents as class started. The results from this little study
are striking. Students were FAR more likely to earn 3 or 4 out of 4 if they had
played the game, even for as little as 5 minutes.
The students then played Chairs! throughout the class period
and I gave them a different four-point quiz. Over 90% of the students of them
improved on their initial scores—excluding, of course, those with 4/4 on the
first quiz.
Yes, I was very pleased with learning outcomes. It’s
difficult not to improve understanding, when you can practice over and over (and
over) by playing a game. That’s one of the main ideas of game-based learning.
The trick, of course, is to make a game that students will actually play.
It was amazing to see how much they liked the Chairs! game.
I received an email at 11pm that night from Cathy: “I need to stop playing this game! I tried to
break 1000, but I messed up.” (She earned 955.) And a text from Jackie the next
day, saying she would be late for cross country practice with a screen shot
with a score of 2056(!). Even if students were scoring in the ‘normal’ range of
30 – 100, they were having fun solving the puzzles.
We are hoping to get our game out to everyone as soon as
development and Apple will allow. An Android version is also in the works. My
students have devised all sorts of essential features and in-app purchases to
make the game even better. I have written them all down and sent them to Joe.
Right now, the goal is a simple, free game with a short non-interactive tutorial
section. Bells and whistles to follow.
Watch out for Chairs! And make time to play this addictive
puzzle game. (Even if organic chemistry is not part of your past, present, or
future.)
(I had to add an exclamation point at the end, because someone else already had a Chairs app.)
Here's the link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/ app/chairs!/id916843853?ls=1& mt=8
Here's the link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/
Saturday, August 23, 2014
BCCE2014: Keeping the boat afloat!
A year ago in May, my history colleague (@mahabs9) gave me my first lesson in Twitter.
At the time I had no idea what even a hashtag was. (Why are folks putting pound signs all over the place and didn't they forget the .com on their @name?) I had just started my company and my producer set up a Twitter and this blog for me and said "You need to do this." Great. More things on my plate.
Twitter has been a great adventure for me and culminated with a week of chemistry collaboration at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education in August, and, best of all, the journey continues!
I connected fairly early with a set of chemistry teachers through #chemchat. I knew @BCCE2014 was in my backyard at GVSU in Allendale, MI. Doug Ragan (@dragan39) was putting together a symposium on global collaboration in chemistry. I decided my What's UR Rxn? chemistry blog project seemed to fit with the theme. (My presentation is at the bottom of this post.)
It was wonderful to meet face-to-face with these inspirational teachers who I had only known on through Twitter. I was a avid spectator in their #molympics events last fall and had watched as the library of short videos came together last spring. I had learned a ton about flipped teaching, had discussions about the new AP curriculum, and debated different methods of reaching students from many of these folk.
Another great part of the BCCE2014 experience was the interaction between higher educators and secondary educators. I was very much impressed with the concept that one could flip a huge lecture section of chemistry. Professors spoke honestly about their experiences as chemistry 'teachers' as opposed to chemistry 'lecturers.' Both groups brought different mindsets and skills sets to the table to the benefit of both.
Our symposium was on the very last day of BCCE2014 and coming back from a night on the town on Tuesday, we bemoaned the fact that we would be talking mostly to ourselves. (Heck, we had been doing that for a year on Twitter, we could have stayed home!) We had a full classroom for our symposium and even at the end of the conference, teachers and professors were learning enthusiastically from each other.
After BCCE, we have kept the discussion open about more collaboration. Dave Prindle (@dprindle) has put together collabchem.us for a more permanent home for #molympics, video warm-up library, and other #chemchat ideas.
Eric Postuma-Adams (@eposthuma) shared a first-day-of-school activity in which students work in groups to build a boat out and see how many pennies it can hold before it sinks. Doug created a hashtag, #buildaboat, to follow along as many of us try this out with our students in the next week. So, if you are inspired, join us as we work together to create interesting, thoughtful, informative chemistry lessons for our students. And definitely, feel free to collaborate with us!
Also, when I checked #buildaboat today, I found this marvelous tweet from some real boat builders in Turkey. Let's lose sight of the shore for our students, knowing that we can work together to keep that boat afloat!
At the time I had no idea what even a hashtag was. (Why are folks putting pound signs all over the place and didn't they forget the .com on their @name?) I had just started my company and my producer set up a Twitter and this blog for me and said "You need to do this." Great. More things on my plate.
Twitter has been a great adventure for me and culminated with a week of chemistry collaboration at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education in August, and, best of all, the journey continues!
I connected fairly early with a set of chemistry teachers through #chemchat. I knew @BCCE2014 was in my backyard at GVSU in Allendale, MI. Doug Ragan (@dragan39) was putting together a symposium on global collaboration in chemistry. I decided my What's UR Rxn? chemistry blog project seemed to fit with the theme. (My presentation is at the bottom of this post.)
Off to downtown Grand Rapids! |
Another great part of the BCCE2014 experience was the interaction between higher educators and secondary educators. I was very much impressed with the concept that one could flip a huge lecture section of chemistry. Professors spoke honestly about their experiences as chemistry 'teachers' as opposed to chemistry 'lecturers.' Both groups brought different mindsets and skills sets to the table to the benefit of both.
Our symposium crew. |
After BCCE, we have kept the discussion open about more collaboration. Dave Prindle (@dprindle) has put together collabchem.us for a more permanent home for #molympics, video warm-up library, and other #chemchat ideas.
Eric Postuma-Adams (@eposthuma) shared a first-day-of-school activity in which students work in groups to build a boat out and see how many pennies it can hold before it sinks. Doug created a hashtag, #buildaboat, to follow along as many of us try this out with our students in the next week. So, if you are inspired, join us as we work together to create interesting, thoughtful, informative chemistry lessons for our students. And definitely, feel free to collaborate with us!
Also, when I checked #buildaboat today, I found this marvelous tweet from some real boat builders in Turkey. Let's lose sight of the shore for our students, knowing that we can work together to keep that boat afloat!
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Praying for the Epiphany
The first quarter of my sophomore year at the University of Minnesota
kicked my butt. I went into that year with nary a B on my record
anywhere. Then I had organic chemistry. Five lectures a week with Professor
Raymond Dodson. I had no idea how to learn the subject; it mystified me. Sometime
in late November, the light went on and the mechanism arrows started to make
sense. By that point, it was way too late for an A, but the next two quarters of
organic chemistry seemed pretty easy. The organic chemistry epiphany had
happened.
Mechanisms became puzzles to solve. In fact, in graduate
school, I loved the Name Reaction assignments of Professor Norm Lebel at
Wayne State. We were given a giant list of reactions and had to draw out the
mechanisms for all of them. At the time, there weren’t the great internet resources there are
now. I spent hours playing with the arrows to make each reaction work.
I have been teaching organic chemistry to high school
juniors and seniors now for twenty years. My course follows the standard
organic curriculum of a college course. I am blessed with six beautiful hoods
and great equipment. My students graduate from high school with three solid
years of chemistry under their belts: introductory, AP, and organic
chemistry. Most of them are seniors and their grade at semester is the primary
focus of their learning. (Yes, it would be great if this weren’t true…) Just as I did, they study and keep ‘praying for the epiphany’ to happen as we have come to say in my class.
Teaching in class sizes of between 10 and 16, I can easily
see when students' arrows are not doing what they are supposed to do. I love the
title of this paper, Decorating with Arrows..., as that is exactly what students do when they do not understand
how to map the reaction mechanisms. Eventually, nearly all of my students
attain mechanistic mastery, with the instant feedback of my small
classroom an important part of the picture.
So, how to scale this kind of educational experience to
those students who cannot go to my expensive private school near Detroit,
MI? And do it in a way that makes students want to understand organic
chemistry? In fact, design a method so that 8-year-olds or 80-year-olds or anyone
in between can play the puzzles that make up organic chemistry. That’s the
big idea behind my beautiful organic chemistry games.
It’s been quite a journey from my classroom into the world
of start-up founder. Yes, ups and downs, pivots, roadblocks, all different
kinds of metaphors are appropriate as one creates a business out of a concept. We
have wireframes, game mechanics, visual design, prototypes, and a patent application. We have academic
partners for beta-testing. We have a fabulous pitch deck that details the value
proposition and the roadmap of sales channels. And we are building these games
and they are awesome.
So, keep an eye on my Twitter feed as we move toward the
launch of our first game, Chairs, this summer. The plan right now is to use
that game to jumpstart a Kickstarter campaign to build Cyclo6, the mechanism game.
And once that’s out, students will be playing for the epiphany instead of
praying for it!
This post written for #realtimechem week. #realtimechemcarnival
Julia Winter @ochemprep
Julia Winter @ochemprep
Monday, May 12, 2014
It Started with a Tweet: Start-Up Weekend EDU
I wrote last July about an event which
- Lasted three days over a weekend and sleep was limited
- Gathered passionate people together to accomplish a common goal
- Was difficult to describe to anyone who had not been part of it
That blog post about the Great
Lakes Relay is the most widely read post that I have written.
The Twin Cities Start-Up Weekend EDU had so many
similarities to the GLR (or The Relay, as most of us call it), it’s unnerving. Though access to bathrooms was definitely a big plus in this event. (You need to read the
other post to understand.)
I followed Kristin Daniels (@kadaniels) when I was
very new to Twitter last summer, I was learning to flip my classroom and she
seemed to be interesting. About a month ago, she tweeted about Start-up Weekend
EDU in Minneapolis. Within an hour, I had a plane ticket and had emailed my school director
that I would be missing a couple days of school for an Ed Tech “conference.”
(Kristin was the first of my teacher tweet-folk to become more than just a handle. I
recognized her right away.)
We started building my game Cyclo6 on Friday night. Jason had heard my practice pitch and was
the first to jump on my team. David seemed to take control and off we went—or was
it Matt? At that point, everyone looked alike
to me! I did not know ANY of them. I explained my ideas and they started doing their coding
thing.
My parents in Plymouth were my bed-and-breakfast and
rental car agency. I did not see them but for coffee after my run each morning.
By Saturday evening, Ryan had add made great
progress in making cool molecule-looking things dance across a screen. I had spoken with business folk from Pearson, GoKart Labs, and really connected with Curt Prins—a
guy with Michigan roots. Pat was a fellow chemistry teacher, and we hit it off
from the get-go. We worked on the slide deck until the doors closed on Saturday
evening. All these people helping to make my dream come to life!
Sunday was all about the pitch. Whoa, the work we
did was intense. (My team made me go take a walk a few times—I think they were
a bit nervous about my sanity!) Every
word analyzed. Every slide minimalized. Dark slides, yet oh, so cool! My team
would not let me see the finished game until it was ready, even then I did not
really see it in action until the actual pitch.
The whole weekend was a remarkable and
emotional experience. (Yup, I got a bit choked up at the end of my presentation…)
I thank those who put on the event and everyone else who built those
other awesome educational products.
So next stop, Detroit TechWeek LAUNCH start-up
contest. Playing with the big dogs, now. I have a prototype, a pitch deck, and the confidence to get this business moving forward.
Amazing, all because of a Tweet.
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Getting new glasses--my journey into game design
I was one of those kids who needed glasses in 1st
grade. My eyesight continued to get worse throughout my childhood years. In
fact, I was part of a study in which I had my eyes dilated during upper
elementary school to keep me from becoming even more near-sighted. (BTW, wearing bifocals
and wrap-around sunglasses and looking stoned all day was not a good thing for
the social standing of a 12-year-old girl!)
So what does this have to do with game design? I do not see the
world clearly without assistance. Over the
last eight months I have been building a company around games for chemistry, specifically organic chemistry.
In order to develop teaching games, one needs to look at pedagogy with new eye wear, and thanks to my game guy, my son, and most of all, my students, game
design has even changed the way I think about how I teach in my classroom. The
focus has become less about the teaching of the concepts and more on the
discovery of the ideas.
Last fall, I hired a consulting firm (Brilliant Chemistry--really, the name of the company--chemistry as a metaphor only) to help me devise a
road map to take some games I had put together with a former student and turn them into a business. The 'Chemists,' in turn, hired a
game guy, Joe Engalan, to take a school teacher and turn her into game designer. I have
to give a ton of credit to Joe. Our Basecamp site is filled with long
back-and-forth discussions about both games and chemistry. There were many “with
all due respects” and “don’t take this the wrong way,” but I slowly began to
see the light and start to understand.
“But,
you're not *studying* organic chem (and dealing with all of the
angst and baggage associated with *studying*), you're playing a game and
learning the mechanics of organic chemistry in order to move forward in the
game.” (Joe)
Strata |
The best source of game
design knowledge came from my students. They coached me through Flappy Bird
before it disappeared. I never scored more than 2 on that game. (This Flappy craze came
right during midyear exams and I wonder whether my students’ grades were
affected by that damn bird.) They showed me a trivia quiz game in which I
answered questions about chemistry against some unknown person. (I won.)
Block 7 Organic Chemistry |
Perloo |
So, now, every moment I have
free, I am thinking about how to take the overall concepts of chemistry and
distilling them down to simple terms in order to put them into a game. Games
which will have no explicit rules or didactic teaching. Puzzles. Jerome Bruner
in his book The Process of Education, first published in 1960, postulated that if ideas are presented in small pieces even young children can grasp the inductive
reasoning skills and intuition necessary to understand complex ideas of
physics, geometry, and even calculus.
Hey, with my games, they
should be able to grasp organic chemistry, too.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
What's UR Rxn? Putting it together
Since the beginning of this blog project, I have had students make decisions in the development and design of the assignment. The final step of the process was to create the actual blog page. We put together a rough outline of the layout on Blogger and then played with the template designer for a few days to create the look we liked. I had some fun with my document camera and my graphite model, so originally I placed this rather busy image behind the blog.
I was quickly overruled by my students, and this much calmer white-on-white image of glassware was composed and substituted.
While one group worked on the layout, others brainstormed the tagline and the description of the blog. Helena designed our Chem Bee from our school's logo. Neha wrote the introductory post and Vivek edited it for her. So our Chem Blog was ready for the world!
Here is the link to the student's blog: http://whatsurrxn.blogspot.com/
We also have a Twitter account for the blog: @Whats_UR_rxn
Each student and I work together to design each blog post. These posts will be added to the blog at a rate of 2-3 per week. The whole concept of publishing their work to a global audience is enthralling to say the least. Please stop by, read and comment! (And thanks to Lowell Thomson in Bucharest, Romania, my students have had comments posted from the other side of the Atlantic. Check out his chemistry students' blog, too.)
Here are the links to my posts in succession for ideas on how to incorporate blogging into a science classroom. I will be presenting this idea at the Biennial Conference for Chemical Educators 2014 at Grand Valley State in Allendale, Michigan in August. (West Michigan is a beautiful place--especially the Lake Michigan beach.)
What's UR Rxn?
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