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Spectacular, SPECTRACULAR! Organic Chemistry App

Scaffolding students' spectroscopy skills in the simulation layer: We're building a QaRd game!

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Spectacular, SPECTRACULAR! Organic Chemistry App

Spectacular, SPECTRACULAR! Organic Chemistry App

Spectacular, SPECTRACULAR! Organic Chemistry App

Spectacular, SPECTRACULAR! Organic Chemistry App

Spectacular, SPECTRACULAR! Organic Chemistry App

Scaffolding students' spectroscopy skills in the simulation layer: We're building a QaRd game!

Scaffolding students' spectroscopy skills in the simulation layer: We're building a QaRd game!

Scaffolding students' spectroscopy skills in the simulation layer: We're building a QaRd game!

Scaffolding students' spectroscopy skills in the simulation layer: We're building a QaRd game!

Wolfbird Studios
Wolfbird Studios
Wolfbird Studios
Wolfbird Studios
1 Campaign |
Sparta, United States
$2,329 USD 19 backers
11% of $20,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal
Concept
The project team has not yet produced a working demo for their concept. Their ability to successfully produce a prototype may be affected by product development or financial challenges.
Lightbulb Wrench Warehouse Truck
Concept Prototype Production Shipping

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).

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

  • 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.
  • 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.

Why Spectroscopy?  Why an app and paper cards?

Spectroscopy is the technology behind so much of how we study the chemical composition of things, from plastics to pharmaceuticals.  Just understanding that little part of “how stuff works in the world” (such as how we “take pictures” of or observe chemicals that are too small to take visual images of) is very powerful!   This app will help students acquire these skills and have a better understanding of why they’re important.

Bridging the gap between the classroom and individual study time is a pretty big deal too.  It’s something that a lot of organizations try to do, with varied levels of success.  We think that this app is a different approach to that “hybridization” of real and virtual learning experiences that has the potential for serious success and impact, not just with spectroscopy and chemistry but with a variety of subjects worth learning about!

 

Read even more about the potential educational impacts of the Spectracular! game and app.

We'll be posting additional explanatory videos as updates throughout the campaign.  Stay tuned!

Risks & Challenges

With any interactive media design project, there are myriad challenges that could present themselves.  With this phase of Spectracular!, we could have issues with our paper card game printing vendor, we could have logistical issues with in-person testing of continued paper and clickable prototyping, and there’s always the problem of “feature creep”, but we’re confident that between the two of us, we’ve got the organic chemistry subject matter expertise and decades of research, design, development, and assessment expertise to manage any challenge that arises in this extensible project.  We can always scale down the model, and much of what needs to be prioritized at the prototyping phase becomes most obvious as the prototyping phase is happening. :)

In fact: one of our perks is designed to allow interested parties to be involved along the way, participating in Q&A sessions during regular design progress updates.

Other Ways You Can Help

We know not everyone can contribute financially, so we’d like to ask for additional help getting the word out to other interested folks.

Tell your chemistry geek friends, your educational friends, your friends with college students, and anyone who ever may have struggled through organic chemistry in college (or who’s struggling through it now!).  Tell you friends and colleagues who use scientific methods in their everyday life about what we’re trying to accomplish with this game and app!

Please share our campaign across all your relevant social media channels.

We appreciate all the support we can get, no matter which form it takes!

Thank you. :)

Looking for more information? Check the project FAQ
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Choose your Perk

Chip In!

Chip In!

$5 USD
As our way of saying thanks, you'll have your name (or the name of a loved one) added to our "Contributor's Wall" on the project website.
Included Items
  • Your Name On Contributors Wall
Estimated Shipping
June 2020
0 claimed
Thank You!

Thank You!

$10 USD
As our way of saying thanks, you'll get a signed thank you card with a handwritten note of our appreciation. We'll include a nice Spectracular! vinyl-cut sticker as an additional thank you. :)
Included Items
  • Signed Thank You Card
  • Spectracular! Sticker
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
2 out of 200 of claimed
Ships to United States of America, Canada
Digital Card Pack

Digital Card Pack

$25 USD
We'll send you a digital download pack including: 1 - The whole deck of Spectracular! cards, in PDF format you can print and cut out yourself. 2 - A PDF user guide and instructor guide for playing the game in class.
Included Items
  • Card Deck Digital Download
Estimated Shipping
June 2020
7 claimed
Get Mugged!

Get Mugged!

$25 USD
Get a limited edition Spectracular! coffee mug and enjoy your favorite beverage in style. (Coffee, tea, water, juice, beer, wine, whatever...) This perk is the ONLY way to get this mug. :)
Included Items
  • Spectracular! Coffee Mug
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
1 out of 200 of claimed
Ships to United States of America
Sponsor A Student!

Sponsor A Student!

$25 USD
Your contribution covers the cost of designing this phase of the Spectracular! project for one undergraduate student. We'll send you a written thank you note! If you've got a specific student in mind, let us know, and we'll include them in the note, and you can share it with them. :)
Included Items
  • Signed Thank You Card
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
4 out of 200 of claimed
Ships to United States of America, Canada
Team Tee

Team Tee

$50 USD
Join the contributor team and get this sweeet Team Spectracular! t-shirt to show off to all your geekiest friends.
Included Items
  • Spectracular! T-Shirt
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
1 out of 200 of claimed
Ships to United States of America
Monthly Discussions

Monthly Discussions

$100 USD
During this phase of design and prototyping of the Spectracular! card game app, we will be holding monthly webinar-style design discussions using Zoom. We'll offer behind-the-scenes updates and progress reports for what's going on, and open things up for Q&A to get feedback from fans of the project. You'll get access to at least four meetings.
Included Items
  • Monthly Online Discussions!
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
0 out of 100 of claimed
Focused Conversation

Focused Conversation

$200 USD
Get a private discussion with our design team, for you or your team! During this phase of design and prototyping, we'll schedule a one hour videoconference in which we'll discuss your choice of project details, concerning interactive design, learning and assessment design, research design, or some combination.
Included Items
  • Single Private Videoconference
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
0 out of 100 of claimed
Sponsor A Classroom!

Sponsor A Classroom!

$250 USD
Your contribution covers the cost of designing this phase of the Spectracular! card game app for an entire classroom of undergraduate chemistry students. We'll send you a written thank you note! If you've got a specific professor's classroom in mind, let us know, and we'll include them in the note, and you can share it with them. :)
Included Items
  • Signed Thank You Card
Estimated Shipping
July 2020
0 out of 100 of claimed
Classroom Pack

Classroom Pack

$300 USD
Send our finished prototype (and the full classroom package) to your favorite chemistry professor! We'll provide the paper and digital download versions of the card game, all the instructor materials, access to animated explanations, and access to the prototype for all the professor's organic chemistry students. Play in class and study at home!
Included Items
  • Signed Thank You Card
  • Spectracular! Sticker
  • Card Deck Digital Download
  • Printed Card Deck
  • Spectracular! Prototype
Estimated Shipping
November 2020
0 out of 100 of claimed
Ships to United States of America, Canada
Research Partner

Research Partner

$400 USD
Basically, this perk allows us to set aside time to work with another research partner. You have the option to designate a potential research partner, and we'll reach out to them. We'll set up several meetings with each partner to discuss how to collaborate and research various aspects of Spectracular! in other university classrooms.
Included Items
  • Multiple Videoconferences
Estimated Shipping
September 2020
1 out of 100 of claimed

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