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Will Critical Mass woo students to the field?
You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die.
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Comments
As a materials PhD student who diverts himself with video games, in my probably underinformed opinion I think that incorporating video games into college level instruction is a poor strategy. Like all things in life, video games have their place, but I think that it is not in the classroom. Sure, they might be able to effectively communicate very simple knowledge such as terminology which has to be memorized by rote, but I don't see how they could convey the theoretical models needed to even solve relatively elementary problems. Also, how is it possible to make the instructional aspects dominate over the purely gaming aspects (such as shooting, etc.)? Is it really possible to purely incorporate the two, so that the video game success gratification can only be attainble if the player can apply the course's concepts? And in doing so, can we actually still make the video game fun? That seems like the true goal of developing an educational video game, and it is certainly an elusive, if not impossible, one.
Posted by: Dom | March 31, 2006 05:50 PM
Is this an April Fools Day joke, because if it's not I have an idea for a fun and entertaining TV show called Who Wants to be a Chemist you might want to try.
Posted by: Elon Weintraub | April 2, 2006 02:03 AM
Wile I would have loved to see the video. It was in wmv format. Sadly more and more people post in this propriety format. Leaving everyone who uses Linux looking at a blank video player.
Posted by: Jim | April 3, 2006 02:02 PM
I think the video game would be good as a supplement to a textbook. We already have CD-ROM's for just about every subject with interactive quizzes, cross-words, etc. What's the difference? You could have each level of the video game correspond to a unit in the class. If the student chooses to go on to the next level, they're working ahead. That's great! In the chemistry example, you could have one level that is all about stoichiometry and another, for example that is about synthesis. Many video games have this already (a trivia feature or something similar) but there is no curriculum involved.
Posted by: Stefan | April 4, 2006 08:04 PM
The video looks like any other first person shooting game. It didn't look very educational, but I guess that's the point. It's very difficult to make a FUN game that also provides rich learning learning environment. Most of the things that kids find fun in video games (blowing things up, shooting, driving fast, etc.) don't lend themselves to academic learning unless the flow of game is stopped. For example, in the video it looked like the player was shooting stacks of compressed gas cylinders. A great lesson in gas laws, but how do you fit that in? Being a gamer and a chemistry teacher, I'd be interested in trying it out once it is finished.
Posted by: Mitch | April 5, 2006 12:56 PM
What a waste of time - surely the answer to interesting students in chemistry is simply to pay qualified chemists a damn site more and take a scythe to the whole range of soft option arts subjects which clog up our universities and cost the nation its scientific talent?
Posted by: Bob Talbot | April 5, 2006 05:38 PM
What a waste of time - surely the answer to interesting students in chemistry is simply to pay qualified chemists a damn site more and take a scythe to the whole range of soft option arts subjects which clog up our universities and cost the nation its scientific talent?
Posted by: Bob Talbot | April 5, 2006 05:38 PM
I am amazed at the lengths to which teachers will go to avoid the actual
business of teaching . First it was film-strips (remember them?) Now it's
PowerPoint (yes, they really use it at Miami-Dade College.)
My impression of PowerPoint is that it's digitized Kodachrome. And if you spell "its" as
"it's", it really looks good up there .
Posted by: Albert Kirsch | April 5, 2006 09:36 PM
I agree with Albert's comments above. I taught organic chemistry for over two years at UCLA, and it is amazing just how ineffective a lot of the instruction is at a relatively high-profile department. It horrified me to hear people talk about multiple choice exams and PowerPoint lectures... At the end of the day, chemistry is largely a structure-driven subject, and nothing can match the power of a piece of chalk and a chalkboard. Sure, you can supplement it with all manner of bells and whistles, but that's all they are...
Posted by: Stuart Cantrill | April 6, 2006 03:35 PM
I hope this is an april fools joke.
Chemistry is a practical subject, the best way to learn how to do chemistry is by hands on experimenting. In the early 90s (92-95) Imperial College used to do their 10 week terms as 5 taught and 5 full time practical.
Surely to get people interested and enthusiastic the only way to do it is to actually get them in a lab experiencing and learning.
Powerpoint and video games seem to be avoiding the issue here.
Posted by: Jon Turner | April 7, 2006 08:41 AM