Second Life at the ACS and Quizzes

Yesterday, I gave my first talk at the March07 ACS meeting on Teaching Organic Chemistry with Blogs and Wikis. The screencast is now available.

It was part of a symposium on Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry organized by Harry Pence and Andrea Gay. Joanna Scott gave a most interesting talk about Nature's experimentation with Second Life and the great possibilities for communicating research work. Harry is also involved with Second Life. Indeed I met him in world by accident a few days ago!

Largely because of Beth Ritter-Guth's tireless dedication to implementing educational opportunities in Second Life, I am finally coming around and seeing the potential for teaching and research. With the help of Eloise Pasteur (SL name), Beth has created an adaptation of the EduFrag quizzes for second life.

The rules are the same but the interface is very different from Unreal Tournament. Click on the obelisk to get the quiz started. Four images will appear and only one will be correct. Click on the correct one to go to the next set. Clicking on an incorrect image will make you start over. If you make it past the 20th room you will be a rewarded with a picture of my cat yawning.

The material in the current quiz is on introductory organic chemistry (Lewis structures, Newman projections, nomenclature, etc.) and I will make good use of it in the class I am teaching next week.

Give it a try and let me know how it works. The quiz is located in the Open Notebook Science building on Eduisland (slurl). We'll be adding more material related to UsefulChem there shortly (thus the use of the Blue Obelisk).