Beer Chemistry Quiz on ChemTiles

During the Chemical Information Retrieval course I taught in the Fall of 2009, Alex Bilinski did a project on the chemistry of beer. He created a set of images with information that is either true or false in any context.

I just added these images of beer chemistry to the ChemTiles game, which I am actively using in my current Organic Chemistry I (CHEM241) course. Andrew Lang has made it very easy to add content to the game by simply uploading to a Flickr group. The category is determined by the Flickr tag.

I won't be testing my organic students on beer but they might find it fun to play that category. Alex wrote a fascinating report "Beer Flavor Compounds and Detection Methods" that can be used as a study guide for the quiz.

My students are currently competing on the topics of Lewis structures, hybridization, Newman projections and nomenclature. They simply need to sign in by entering "contest1" for the group name. The student in my class with the highest score for the contest1 group at the end of class (10:50 AM) on April 9, 2010 will win an organic chemistry textbook. As I have done in previous classes I'll run a few of these contests over the term with increasing amounts of course content.

It turns out that the ChemTiles game is very convenient to play on a Droid phone (and presumably on an iPhone although I have not checked that yet). For many students this might be a preferred way to review material before tests when on the move. I'll find out at the end of the term.

NASA Open Notebook Science Talk April 09

On April 15, 2009 I had an opportunity to give a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I talked about Open Notebook Science and all of the Web 2.0 tools that we use to operate. There were no chemists in the audience but hopefully the overall patterns of how all the components interconnected made enough sense to be useful.

I had a full hour so this talk is a pretty comprehensive summary of our projects, including the most recent work on the Spectral and ChemTiles games and the automated backing up of Google Spreadsheet documents and semi-automated solubility calculations using web services called from within Google Spreadsheets. All of this work was only possible because of Andy Lang's rapid development efforts. Tony Williams also assisted greatly with the Spectral Game.


slides

We had a very nice conversation over lunch with a few NASA people. I found it interesting that many apparently very different user environments (librarians, educators, molecular biologists, cosmologists, etc.) share very similar needs for Web2.0 technologies. For example delicious was lauded as a very convenient alternative to email for sharing content. The distribution of personalities seems to be similar everywhere: a few early adopters within a larger more skeptical population.

After lunch Emma Antunes gave me a tour of the facilities. Despite the annoying rain to get between buildings, it was well worth it. Here are some of the cool things that I saw:

An enormous room housing very large speakers for testing the effect of vibrations on spacecraft and equipment. Emma stands next to one of the several speakers.



A huge centrifuge for testing the robustness of instruments. Emma said that they were able to put an SUV on there to how much force was required to tip it over.



I saw one of the satellites for the Solar Dynamics Observatory under construction. The idea of this project is to use the different perspectives from satellites at different positions in orbit around the sun to calculate the direction of solar flares and other potentially detrimental activity on the sun.

Next to the largest clean room in the world, there is a display of the guts of the Hubble telescope. Apparently the astronauts had to fix some components in there that were not designed to be accessible so they had to do a lot of practice on a duplicate before attempting the task in space.

The ChemTiles Game

In another example of code and content re-mixing for educational purposes, Andrew Lang and I have adapted many of the elements of the Spectral Game and tiles from the Second Life quizzes I traditionally gave for my introductory organic chemistry course. Many of these tiles were originally created for use in Unreal Tournament.

The concept is simple: tiles represent images or statements that are either true or false in any context. By marking them as true or false and ensuring that one true tile is present in a mix of a number of false ones, games can be designed that vary from rooms within a maze to obelisks offering a selection of floating images in Second Life.

In the current implementation, the tiles appear in a web browser. Clicking on the correct tile produces a new random selection. Clicking on a false tile stops the game and records the player's score. Following the same structure as the most recent implementation of the Spectral Game, the first 10 queries present only two tiles. As the game progresses the difficulty level increases and more tiles are included.

Whereas the Spectral Game obtained spectra and molecules from ChemSpider, this game taps into a set of 256 x 256 pixel images in a Flickr group. Using Flickr lets us leverage the ability to easily tag images, which can then be used by players to select different topics to practice.

I'll be giving a prize to the student in my current CHEM241 class who scores highest by 10:50 ET April 10, 2009. The student must play under the "all tags" option, which covers all the material before test 1, given the following week. Students can also practice different modules by selecting tags like Lewis Structures, Hybridization, Nomenclature, Newman Projections, etc.

I think that this approach of rapid remixing of code and content on free hosted platforms (like Flickr or ChemSpider) is really the future of technology in education. It will be difficult for heavy top down - and expensive - systems to compete against the incredible flexibility of these lighweight and loosely connected initiatives led by educators with the simple motivation of just experimenting with teaching in a better way.