SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project makes the theoretical touchable for organic chemistry students by building a game for mobile devices based on mechanisms. Mechanisms are maps of bond-breaking and bond-making events illustrating how an organic reactant is transformed into a product. This underpinning concept is a powerful tool used both in the teaching and the practice of organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is traditionally the gateway class for students progressing into STEM careers, such as medicine and engineering. The course has earned its roadblock reputation with attrition rates in the range of 30-50%. The fail-rate for under-represented minorities and first generation students is even higher than that of the general student population. Students' previous learning in chemistry or other sciences does not adequately prepare them for the cognitive load of structure and pattern recognition required to master organic chemistry. This project will produce the mechanism game and bring a tactile interface to learning chemistry. The game is designed to span the entire curriculum, into graduate levels. The accessibility and relatively economical cost-structure of the mechanism game is particularly attractive to the market of students needing to excel in organic chemistry to achieve their career goals.The technical innovation of this project is delivering the content of chemical mechanisms using a touch-screen, game-based format. By layering audio, visual, and kinesthetic cues in the user interface of the game, students will 'feel' bond-breaking and making, acidity, and resonance. The mechanism game is an intrinsically motivating system for students to know when they are moving through a reaction mechanism correctly, helping students gain the intuition necessary for success in organic chemistry. The important piece of this project is the development of this new learning tool as a game, as opposed to an interactive tutorial. The research will focus on the iterative process of creating engaging game-play by field-testing with players as the game is developed. The technical challenge of the project is devising a game that can tolerate the scientific scrutiny of academic chemists while remaining appealing to even the casual game player. The key metric for success will be testing the mechanism game with chemistry professors and instructors to determine whether they would recommend the game to their organic chemistry students.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project answers the call that science students go beyond memorizing facts to understand content on a deeper, conceptual level. In chemistry, this goal is particularly difficult to achieve because the underlying concepts describe the behaviors of particles that are not directly observable to students. College instructors are also under added pressure to transform their teaching methods to help ensure student retention and success. In the subject area of organic chemistry, this transformation is even more important, due to the relatively high fail-rate in the course, especially for under-represented minorities and first generation students. The mobile learning tools and data collection platform in this project would help to solve both of these issues with an innovative method for intuitive learning and assessment which helps to make molecules and reactions come alive with game-based mobile applications. The game apps are playable by students of all ages, so the concepts of organic chemistry, as well as other science courses, become familiar and accessible as early as middle school. The broader vision is to open the pipeline for students to progress into STEM careers which have been difficult to reach in the past.This project makes the theoretical touchable for organic chemistry students by building mobile game-based learning tools based on mechanisms, a key underlying concept used to teaching the course. This project will produce the Mechanisms suite of game apps, and bring an intuitive, tactile interface to learning chemistry. The research and development of this phase of the project will expand the user interaction model from Phase I to multiple modules of content for students. The data from the mobile learning tools will be synthesized with machine learning techniques to create an adaptive method to ensure the applications provide the appropriate level of challenge to the student learner. Clinical and longitudinal efficacy studies will be part of the research effort as the game modules are developed and released. The data platform will be optimized to integrate with multiple learning management systems and to be readily expandable to subjects beyond organic chemistry. The dashboard of the platform will allow both instructors and students to access the data and inform learning processes to achieve greater comprehension and success in the course. Commercialization will be achieved through direct-to-student downloads, subscriptions of the data platform by institutions, and licensing the technology to courseware providers.