Spectracular! What's that?
Hi there! We’re Jamie and Ben.
Jamie is a chemistry professor at Emory & Henry College in southwestern Virginia. Ben runs The Wolfbird, an interactive multimedia studio in northwestern North Carolina.
This whole thing is Jamie’s idea. A few years ago, she came up with Spectracular! - a card game to help her students learn about spectroscopy as part of the organic chemistry classes she teaches at E&H.
Jamie approached Ben to help her create a mobile app game version of the paper card game. After a few initial exploratory design sessions and conversations with Jamie’s students, Ben kept getting more and more excited about the potential for this project to do so many cool things for learning and assessment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
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Based on this potential, Jamie and Ben decided to move forward with a project much broader than originally intended.
The Problems
Learning about spectroscopy (and how to use it) is difficult because it requires memorization, understanding, and practice. You’ve got to memorize lots of information about values, peaks, structural features, and molecules.
You’ve got to understand how spectroscopy works in order to use it to interpret and predict the effects of chemical features on the peaks of spectra, which basically means learning how to read the images generated by spectroscopy.
To get good at this understanding, interpretation, and prediction, you’ve got to practice. A LOT.
It’s difficult to teach groups of people about spectroscopy (and how to use it) because it’s difficult to provide individual guidance for understanding and interpretation of all these elements of spectroscopy if you’re just one person teaching in a classroom.
Basically, if you’ve got a lot of students, there are limits on the amount of attention you can give to each student when they need help, and there never seems like there’s enough time to give the help you’d like to give.
Assessment of how we learn about spectroscopy is also very difficult.
When it comes to the card game that Jamie has created, keeping track of what each of the students is doing with the paper card game during class is basically impossible for one person to do, especially when the teacher is trying to give good feedback to every student playing the game, all at the same time.
So, we’ve identified our first set of problems to tackle while we improve this card game and design a mobile app to go with it.
The game and the app and everything else we’re building along with them represent our first solutions to these problems.
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The Solutions
To improve learning about spectroscopy, we’re upgrading the paper card game to make it easier to play, so students can focus on learning together, instead of how to play the game. We’re adding user guides and additional reference materials to ship with the game.
We’re prototyping the mobile app to give students a way to check their own structure matches during a card game, and to challenge the matches of other students with greater confidence. We’re also building the app to streamline access to specific reference information based on the cards currently on the table. The app will help students track all the matches they make in class, so they can review them later as many times as they want, linking to interactive step-wise explanatory animations on demand.
We’re building a web dashboard to help students learn more effectively, by tracking their progress with spectroscopy skills as they play the paper card game and use the mobile app inside and outside of class.
To improve teaching about spectroscopy, we’re making the card game into a turn-key product package that can be downloaded or shipped to any undergraduate chemistry classroom in the country. We’re adding an instructor guide system to allow any chemistry professor to implement the paper card game into his or her classroom teaching with confidence—and minimal hassle.
We’re extending the expertise of any chemistry professor to give more effective feedback more often to more of his or her students by combining the usefulness of the mobile app and the web dashboard to coordinate what students already understand with what they’re doing in and out of class. We want to help teachers understand what their students do and don’t understand, and how they can help their students improve their spectroscopy skills in the most meaningful way, working together and separately using the card game and app. We’re building the web dashboard as a teaching tool to serve these purposes.
To improve the ways we can assess how people learn about spectroscopy, we’re hybridizing the paper card game with QR codes, which means we can track a lot more about what students are doing with the card game, not to mention send a lot more data their way (through the mobile app) when they need it. This means we can track what they are doing with the reference materials embedded in the card data. In fact, the mobile app is designed to increase the precision of how we can track all sorts of ways students are interacting with spectroscopy content and activities as they practice and improve.
One of the intended uses of the web dashboard is to watch how students manage their own learning progress through the knowledge, skills, and abilities associated with spectroscopy so we can better triangulate how we interpret the way they are interacting with the card game and the mobile app. Along the same lines, the more precise data collected about students’ repeated interactions with on-demand explanatory animations can be linked to how far along they are in their understanding of spectroscopy and how to use it.
We’re treating the way students play the game and use the mobile app as a series of problems to be solved, which means we can apply problem-based learning and assessment design practices to the way we build the game, app, dashboard, explanatory animations, and reference materials. We’re taking this approach to coordinate the design of our learning outcomes, assessment models, evaluation rubrics, and data protocols. This way we can map all the data we’ll be gathering so we can better understand what the patterns of data mean for how students are learning spectroscopy within the context of organic chemistry.
Everything we do to improve the way we assess students' learning about spectroscopy is intended to improve the ways students learn—and the ways teachers teach—with the card game, app, dashboard, and animations.
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This project has the potential to help college and high school students around the world do a better job learning about spectroscopy and many other aspects of organic chemistry. It has a chance to revolutionize the way we can use digital apps to bridge the gap of personalized assessment inside and outside the classroom.
We need your help to get this hybrid card game concept to prototype so we can continue to seek funding and find a software development company to build the full app.
The Big Ask...
For this campaign, we’re raising $20,000.
Based on an educational discount rate $20,000 will give us five months of focused design and production time for the initial deliverables of the Spectracular! prototype, which include:
- A polished card game ready for turnkey classroom use (as deck packs and print-on-demand PDF files) including functional QR codes for hybrid experiences
- A clickable app prototype on tablets and smartphones
- A web dashboard prototype (for managing learning and assessment)
- Learning and assessment design (such as learning outcomes, assessment models, rubrics, data protocols, and ancillary materials such as instructor guides and user help files)
- Explanatory stepwise diagrammatic animations (storyboarded and produced)
- Research Plan (including hypothesis development, an experimental design roadmap, and a timeline for scalable research implementation with targeted learning audiences)
- Development ready design-documentation package for the purpose of soliciting proposals from leading software development firms
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Check our website for a more detailed overview about the deliverables for this phase of the Spectracular! project. We'll also be releasing update posts throughout this campaign.
The overarching goal of this phase of the project (and its deliverables) is to position our team to gather the evidence we need (by piloting the paper card game along with the app and dashboard prototypes) to seek additional funding from foundations and government organizations such as the National Science Foundation.
WHAT IF WE DON'T MAKE IT?
If we don’t reach our goal, whatever funds we do raise will go toward as many months of prototype development as possible. We will prioritize our deliverables based on any revised budget that may result from this shortcoming.
What's in it for me?
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We’ve got some of the typical perks, like t-shirts and coffee mugs, and a nice handwritten thank you letter, but we think some of our perks are really unique!
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SPONSOR A STUDENT: This is particularly cool. You get to ensure that, somewhere in the world, a college student gets to use this card game and app to improve his or her spectroscopy skills.
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MONTHLY DISCUSSIONS: Want to join in the design conversation? We're offering this opportunity for people to participate in monthly "behind the scenes" design meetings where you can get updates, ask questions, and give feedback about the design work we're doing on the project.
