The Chairs! game: a history

Chairs! started the whole thing. 

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

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

Getting new glasses--my journey into game design

I was one of those kids who needed glasses in 1^st 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)

In the midst of these discussions, my 23-year-old son, Peter, came home for Thanksgiving. At the end of the weekend, we went to a Coney Island and talked about game design throughout the meal and all the way to the airport as he returned to his home in Phoenix. For a good two hours we talked. He was even more pointed in his comments to me. “No, mom, no one wants to play a game that even resembles school.” (Great, I taught the young man for two years in high school; even more of Joe’s ‘angst and baggage.’)

Strata

So, being the deliberative type, I needed to experience these concepts myself and bought some games. I really liked Division Cell (nice design, from my second country, Finland) until I got stuck in the middle and felt like I was just going in circles. I still love to play Strata, a beautiful ribbon-weaving game that never seems to end. (The Strata folk, Graveck of Minneapolis, also wrote a nice piece about the game’s development.)

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

But the most amazing episode in my study of games came with a beautiful puzzle game called Perloo. A former student had worked with these Dutch designers and tweeted about missing her train due to being “lost in Perloo.” I downloaded the game immediately. I played it a bit, and got frustrated with the lack of rules, but would come back to it over and over.

Perloo

I had it on my iPad and showed it to a few students. A group of them spent the bulk of the class period working on the different levels of Perloo. (OK, so they should have been working on organic problems, but, heck, they are seniors!) My iPad was passed to the next group of students and the game continued into the next class. I often tell my students that learning chemistry requires “butt time,” that is, “sit your butt down and learn it.” Not an easy task. Here I watched students, some of whom have struggled in my chemistry classes for two years, concentrating all their collective effort to solve tough conceptual problems using a game. Granted, Perloo is not an 'educational' game, but that does not mean it is not teaching something. The ah-ha! moment, the epiphany, happened for me on that day. I reached into my pocket and put on my new glasses. I saw what Joe, Peter, and my students have been trying to show me over the last few months.

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.