Spectral Game talk at ACS Fall 09

Yesterday (August 17, 2009) I gave my talk on the Spectral Game at the Using Technology to Enhance Learning in Organic Chemistry symposium at the American Chemical Society meeting. I was not able to attend the entire symposium but luckily I did catch David Soulby's talk on using Google groups to distribute NMRs for labs that require many students to submit samples. I am a fan of using free and hosted services to simplify workflows of all types.

Also in attendance at the symposium were Liz Dorland and Bob Hanson. It was good to catch up with them. Bob shared a story of how he has been assigning his students tasks in his organic chemistry class which lead to updating Wikipedia. There is so much potential for using the educational infrastructure to create better scientific content for everyone.

My talk on the Spectral Game highlighted the role of openness in teaching and research to create new educational tools, especially for learning NMR. Tony Williams said a few words at the end about ChemSpider, RSC and some upcoming opportunities to publish synthesis articles on ChemSpider.

Spectral Game ACS Fall 09

View more presentations from Jean-Claude Bradley.

Spectral Game paper live on the Journal of Cheminformatics

Our paper on the Spectral Game is now published:

Jean-Claude Bradley, Robert J Lancashire, Andrew SID Lang and Antony J Williams The Spectral Game: leveraging Open Data and crowdsourcing for education Journal of Cheminformatics 2009, 1:9 doi:10.1186/1758-2946-1-9

This has been an especially gratifying collaboration because of the enthusiasm and vision of my co-authors. The philosophy behind the game is deeply rooted in openness and as a result it is an open ended evolving project. Any new NMR spectra uploaded to ChemSpider and marked as Open Data will continue to be automatically incorporated into the pool of problems. Teachers and students from around the world can play the game and flag problems or errors as they arise. This blurs the line between content creators and consumers and I think reflects a powerful trend that is occurring in education.

Another aspect of openness relating to this endeavor is the communication of our progress. Our paper was written on a public wiki. Not only were we able to discuss our progress on recorded talks and blog posts, but we were also able to cite these as regular references in the paper. And of course the Journal of Cheminformatics is itself an Open Access peer-reviewed publication so there is no limitation to sharing the final product.

Controversy still rages in the blogosphere about the wisdom of blogging research results prior to publication in peer-reviewed journals. It is true that this practice limits where articles can be submitted. Since many of our references are from the Journal of Chemical Education, we contacted the editors to see if they would accept our paper. Unfortunately their current pre-print policy did not allow them to do so.

If more authors begin to see the value of early disclosure it may just start to tip the balance towards journals such as the Journal of Cheminformatics.

Andrew Lang and I have just completed another paper on Chemistry in Second Life - written in the same way - that one just got submitted to Chemistry Central Journal.

Spectral Game Winners

Following up on my last post about the SpectralGame, I have given out 2 molecular model kits to the highest scoring students in my CHEM242 class.

The first winner was Scott Beaudoin with 24 points followed by HaeJi Choi with 17 points.

The current high scores for the Drexel students can be accessed here. High scores from everyone in the world can be found here. The top score is currently 40 by VK.

Andy and Tony continue to fine tune the operation of the game. The recent introduction of a "Reload Spectrum" button below the molecules prevents the game from stopping prematurely if the spectrum won't load for any reason.

We still welcome contributions of spectra (NMR, IR, UV, MS, etc.) and players!