Chem Bridges
HCDE Master's Project
ROLE & DURATION
Role: UX Designer
Date: 2018
Platform:
 iPad
Team: Alec Olschner, Jesse Gylling, Sam Kim
HIGHLIGHTS

●​​​​​​​ Literature review and interviews with high school chemistry teachers
●​​​​​​​ Paper prototype and usability
● Full functioning Axure prototype on iPad
● 99 high school chemistry student demo
OVERVIEW
Chemistry can be a daunting subject due to the abstract nature of the topic and the level of math involved. In 2018, I worked with three other teammates to see how we could improve engagement and learning outcomes for students. While I contributed to all aspects of the project, my main responsibility was designing & building the interactive prototype.
Challenge: How might we increase student engagement and learning outcomes for high school chemistry students?
OUTCOME
An interactive game that teaches stoichiometry by applying the educational concepts of scaffolding, feedback, and analogies. 

One of the levels in our game that I made

INITIAL RESEARCH
For our initial research, we did a literature review along with expert interviews with chemistry high school teachers.
From the literature review, we found that teachers are open to new technologies that are easy to use and engaging for students as long as they were not expensive. This caused us to reconsider utilizing AR and VR as a platform due to the cost of implementation and the difficulty associated with learning a new technology. Instead, we searched for a more practical and accessible solution.
Through five interviews with chemistry teachers, we learned that students learn best when concepts can be explored visually or in a hands-on environment. Other common themes were that complex calculations act as a barrier to student learning and that students have the most difficulty learning stoichiometry. 
PAPER PROTOTYPE & USABILITY
We decided that to teach stoichiometry we would need to break down the entire problem into smaller tasks and employ an educational technique known as scaffolding. To keep students engaged, we decided to use something we felt they would be familiar with: a game.​

Early ideation

The game resembled dragging in pieces of a puzzle to successfully convert units to allow the mole character to go from one side of the screen to the other. The visuals of the prototype represented the typical form of a stoichiometric equation, but replaced the lines one would normally see with hills and bridges. This was done to improve the likelihood that students could transfer the skills learned in the game to performing stoichiometry calculations unaided. 

Usability with our paper prototype

The paper prototype was tested with the help of three chemistry novices and two high school chemistry teachers. Observations were taken and tagged and then sorted in an affinity diagram to see what the biggest issues were. Some of the major ones were:
● Participants had difficulty understanding that the numbers could be dragged down.
● Participants had difficulties when the whole problem was revealed to them all at once instead of in smaller pieces.
● There was not enough feedback when participants got a part of the problem wrong.
HIGH FIDELTIY PROTOTYPE 
From the usability results, we added more levels for scaffolding, animated the numbers to imply the dragging interaction, and integrated real time feedback to help students troubleshoot where they made a mistake. I was the owner of the prototype and was able to make all the levels and interactions in Axure. The interactions and screen size were optimized for iPad - which is what the high schools we were interested in testing with had access to. 

Axure Prototype

HIGH SCHOOL CONCEPT TEST
We were able to test our digital prototype on 99 high school students spread over multiple classrooms. After acquiring both parent and student consent, students were directed to fill out a pre-test survey, interact with the prototype, and finish by filling out the post-test survey.  

Students trying out the prototype on their school iPads

One of the key questions we asked students before and after playing the game was how they rated learning stoichiometry. After playing the game, we saw students rate the topic as being easier than before.

Pre-test (before game) vs post-test (after game) results

Some quotes from the students:
"It didn’t just have elements in them, it used real life situations like making rice."
"I view myself as a visual learner so the game really helped me understand the topic a little more."
"The purpose of the game was very clear and I also liked the games increasing difficulty as you progress in each of the stages."
REFLECTION
Working on an educational problem hit a lot of my interests, and our team created a solution that could be used by teachers to aid students in their ability to learn stoichiometry. 
It's been a few years since working on this project and I have a few thoughts about games and education. The bigger and more interesting problem in education is around motivation and why students engage or don't engage with a subject. You can make stoichiometry easier to learn, but that doesn't mean students are any more interested in the subject than before. 
Inspired by James Paul Gee's writings and talks, the big insight for me is that the best educational games need to be good games first that people actively want to play. It can't just reflect what the test or the textbook has. For example, look at Minecraft. How many software engineers, architects, and game designers will that inspire because players experience the fun of designing and building?
It turns out that learning is actually hard when you're not that motivated. But once you are, as gamers say, "it's just a challenge".  
Back to Top