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m the forum Symposium on Revolution and Evolution in Chemical Education
Technology in Chemistry Education David W. Brooks University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln. NE 68588-0355
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Miles Pickenng was a truly great chemistry educator. To Miles, no question abobt contemporary practice in cnemistn, education was too sacred or dangerous to ask. His experimental designs were stralghtfonvard; his data gathering usuallv flawless. He d i n 7 care what the answer to one of h~s otiestions mioht tum out to be: he was totallv faitMul to his data. Miles unthinkable and isk the unask.-would - -think . the ~-~~ This appmach was evident in the oral remds he made during the symposium at which this paper was presented. Miles Pickering moved chemistry emcation away from mystical practices based upon tradition toward a more orderly and, if you will scientific approach. I miss Miles' contributions very
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Focussing on the high school or college chemistry classroom or teaching laboratory gives little evidence of the effects of 'learning' technologies on instruction. The prevailing teaching strategy remains the teacher talking with chalk in hand. In laboratory instruction, there is a substantial lag between current practice and current instruction, especially with respect to student access to instrumentation. There has been a substantial but undocumented impact of hand calculators upon the "lecture" cumculum. Looming on the horizon, the impact of computers is likely to change completely the goals and purposes of chemistry education. This article concerns these issues.
The Blackboard-Still the Principle Technology Chalk remains the principal classroom technology for college and perhaps for high school chemistry education. High technology, colored chalk, is used infrequently. Slidina blackboards. once the raze in laree .. lecture halls. seem to'he yielding u, simpler sin&-standing chalkboards used together with erasers. The Chalk Chuck,' a mechanical devi& for holding chalk so as to be able to use small pieces effectively and to make using chalk less messy for the instructor, is rarely found in use. Even the most c&ventional teaching techniques resist technological enhancement. Overheads, Television, and Video-Underutilized Technologies Overhead projectors have encroached upon chalkboards to a considerable degree, but the potential of the medium has not been exploited. Projectors are simply used a s illuminated blackboards. Both permanent and erasable writing pens are available, yet few instructors take advantage of this difference by mixing both types of writing together-a valuable trick when teaching multiple sections of the same class. Using overhead projectors to demonstrate chemical phenomena, a teaching technique advanced by Hubert Alyea (11,is also rare. The recent introduction of the simple yet effective "tilted" projection container stand 'Chalk Chuck, The JEMM Co., 3300 Walnut St., Denver, CO 80205. 2B~yle'sLaw Demonstrator, Sargent Welch Catalog # 10770, Skokie, IL. 3~olecularMotion Demonstrator, Sargent Welch Catalog # 1710M,Skokie. IL.
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has not yet increased projected demonstrations (2).Since the amounts of materials used can be fairly small, one wonders whv this technique has not been adopted more widely. The ievelopment df specialized devices for demonstrations of conceots such as Bode's l a d or the Maxwell Boltzmann distri6ution3 has not increased projector use. Even the introduction of professionally developed overhead transparencies madeavailable by publishe;~as part of a large textbook adoption package - has not catalyzed extensiveprojector use. Television also sees minimal use. Excellent videotapes are available, some having been transcribed from pre-\xistine 16-mm film of super8 mm loops. Nevertheless, inclas&om use oftelewsidn is not widespread at the college level. The use of telewsion as an image mamification syntem, an alternative to presenting demons~ratlonson ihe overhead projector, also has not been widespread. This is surprisinfisince the first effort at a complete college chemistry course by John Baxter several decades ago was successful. lThe World of Chemrfitrv series soonsored bv the ~ n n e n b & c project, ~~ a series not avaiiable at thetime of the svmoosium. is exoeriencine considerable use.1 One wonders ik desktop tefevision will have much iipact. Given an approonate master taoe. the l a m scale duofication of V H ~ t a p e sfor bookstore sale is v&y inexpensive. Also. VHS lavers are widelv available to students a t homk andlo; in"d0rmitories. p;rhaps this will increase TV use. Machine-maded examinations are used much more than are other te&ologies. Is teacher time the criterion for the use of a technology? Machine-graded examinations save teacher time in large classes. However, preparing a demonstration takes up more time than does filling that class time by working a second and a third text problem at the board. Computer Technology-4ts Potential
National inadequacies with respect to providing instrumentation and computer hardware for teaching laboratories have been documented. National Science Foundation initiatives are underway to address the problem(3). While one can argue the need for better experiments and better use of student time. the hardware must come first. Resources both from academe and other sources have been inadequate for many years. These davs. one can lecture usine a comouter to orovide images, simulations of experhen&, probfems, and activities. In fad, the lecture that served as a basis for this article was presented completely from a computer at a national ACS meeting: no slides or transparencies, but only an overhead projector showing images from a liquid crystal display. All of the visuals were digitized. Some of my responses to questions from the audience included projection of visuals that were mt presented during the formal talk, but were germane for an adequate response to the question. Some animations were included in the visuals. In other words, the computer was used as a resource for a lecturer; it was not something running in an automaticpilot mode. Lecturing from computers also is not new. Stanley Smith of the University of Illinois and Alan Smith of Drexel University have been using this approach for many years. Resource centers using a blend of human and machinebased tutorials first appeared in the 70's and 80's (4). These became focal points for student help. Computers, video- and audio-tape players, and other technology-based resources found homes in them. The centers have probably had more impact in colleges than any of the aforementioned technologies. High schools do not often have such centers; outside-of-class help is usually accomplished be-
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fore or after hours in the teacher's home room. It is worth noting that resource centers are readily justified from the perspective of learning theory, but lectures are not (5). There was a time when teaching during the first day of chemistry class required a room with special hooks above the chalkboard. These hooks were used to hang the large demonstration slide rule that every teacher owned or accessed. Slide rules are gone, replaced by incredibly powerful hand-held calculators. For some teachers the oroiectable hand-held calculator has replaced the demo&t&tion slide rule. The early days of old chemistry classes oRen consisted of review of mathematics and slide rule use. Somehow, I alwavs felt this was a bad idea-that we should have been talking about chemistry rather than arithmetic during those early classes. When calculators came along, I iniisted that teaching assistants do just that-begin by talking about chemistry. The liberation of the curri&lu& from the slide rule made possible by the hand held calculator was short-lived, however. Computational questions quickly took on additional steps; significant figures went to n greater than 3; and incredible emphasis was placed upon problem-solving algorithms such as the factor-label method with unit cancellation. Quantitative calculations swelled not only to fdl that time-space saved by the displacement of slide rules, but it has expanded way beyond. This happened in the face of clamoring for the inclusion of more descriptive chemistry in the curriculum! You're asked to give talks about technology when you have experience in that area. My early technology experience, though broad, did not focus on computers. The first serious use of computers in my work was as drivers for videodiscs. (Videodiscs are an interim technology between VHS tapes and CD-ROMs.) After a while, it became clear to me that videodiscs were easy to design compared to their companion computer driveis. In fact, as soon as we started using computers to aid in the creation of the master videotapes, thk process of producing a videodisc was simplified greatly. How Teachlng and Learning Will Change
Another revolution is at our doorsteo. Thus far. most computer learning activities have been based upon a teacher-centered stvle of instruction-the teacher decides what problems n e 2 to be done, how to do them, and when mastery or satisfactory performance has been demonstrated. This approach to CAI has been around for 20 years. By late 1990, I had begun working on tutorials where the student entered a problem and independently solved that problem. The program then solved the same problem and compared the two solutions. Germane instruction about solving the problem was provided based upon the student's solution. Each tutorial development began with encoding generic solution strategies to t.ypicdly formatted problems. It was during the-ireparailon for my talk at the symposium that something very simple struck me. Whv would anvone use such a tutorial? Thev mll simply query the computer for an answer, and then go on. Thev will not care how that answer was reached. (That is how we use hand held calculators, and it is a major teacher complaint about their use!) Vast areas of knowledge are being computerized. Mathernatica (6)and Theorist (7) have changed what I need to know about mathematics to use mathematics successfully. A few years ago, developing mathematical models for complex ecosystems could easily occupy a graduate student for several years during doctoral research. Stella (a), an interesting modeling program available today, compresses that time to weeks. The computer center of my youth was a large, expensive, air-conditioned building
filled with machines and several skilled suuoort staff. It is still hard for me to accept that a small u-ber of students (uarticularlv handicauued students) walk around mv campus with lap-top portable compukrs that are more powerful than the mainframes ofmv vouth! Clearlv. more rather than less use of these compukrs will take &ce in the future. Perhaus we will go throwh - a stape - of banning- computers, especially those that place answers to informational auestions at a student's fingertips. (There were bans of hana-held calculators in the mid-seventies.) But such bans must pass. And the nature of the problem-solving software foLgeneral chemistry and organ& chemistry w i ~ change so much that the outcome skills of yesterday and todaywill become the key-presses of tomorrbw. How will this change our instruction? I have no idea. What must one "understand" (a noneducational verb) about stoichiometry to use a lap-top computer to solve stoichiometry problems? Likewise equilibrium problems, redox problems, acidmase problems, free energy problems, ... problems, ... problems, or ... problems? What~Iam certain of is that nearly all traditional undergraduate chemwill be solved usine inexpensive a ~* ~ l i c a i s t uroblems ~ tions programs run on lap-top computers within five years. I do know that. once this software is available.. mv " colleagues in academic research labs will insist that their research students use this soflware. Albr all. it is uroductivity that counts in research. The transformations associated with using computers for such calculations will be enormous. Yes, there will be ghastly chemistry errors. Of course, these kinds of errors have been made every time a technology comes along. Such errors will continue to be made-and recognizing them is what distinguishes the excellent scientist from the good scientist. I am frightened by the scope of the impending changes. In the oast. scientific revolutions in one area did not overlap so much into other areas. Adoctoral student who spent years using fractional distillation to separate and quantify the products of a radical chain reaction in 1940 might be able to reproduce all of that work in days or weeks during 1960. Whit did that change have to do with changes in political science or amnomv? Rarely does one technolorn iike printing emerge-that ov&vhel& not just one discigine but all disciplines concurrently. Even the arts are affected. Modem design courses in fine arts departments are highly computerized. Digitized musical notes produced by musicians never saw - ~ ~ ~ ~who -~~ ~ ~ ~ one another face-to-face can be synthesized into a masterpiece orchestral composition. This chanee is hamenine across the board at one time. Unlike print&, it is' ipreaiing at breakneck speed. How will
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the curriculum chanee? What will be the hallmarks of a professional person?-What will he the hallmarks of a professional chemist? These are auestions for which I have no answers. My f r s t introduction to the hand-held calculator came from an HP-35 salesperson while I was in College Station, Texas. The device was ulaced before me. I was shown its operations, and I was irktructed: "Play with it."That genre of devices chaneed mv life. As a reader of this Journal. it changed your lire, too: I just finished preparing the materials for my upcoming classes. I five eachof my students a 3.5-in. floppv d i s c n o In the near future I'll give them ;computer paper at address. Theyll connect electro~callyto the course materials and suhkit their work electroni&lly through chat address. 1 am writing this paper at a computer, and will submit the manuscriut electronicallv. Yet. as immersed in this computer age as i am already, don't think I have even begun to sense the many important and drastic ways in which these machines will change my professional life. Chemistry remains the science that deals with filling bottles and tank-cars with substances and mixtures. That will remain important and will not change. The excitement of chemistry remains. Your first and wrhaps most imwrtant commu&cation with your mothe;, several days before you developed your first neuron, was a purely chemical commuNc&ionin which you used human &hori&cgonadotropin to tell her not to begin her menses that month (9). There is a level at which a computer can neither enhance nor detract from the meaning of an event. To be able to understand the comulex urocesses of life and environment in molecular terms remiins a compelling reason to study chemistrv. But the meanine of the term "chemist" is about to changi in ways difficultto predict. Twenty years from now, a person asked to contribute an address on the topic of technology in chemistry education will deal with computers in ways not yet imagined. Like the revolution brought on by the hand-held calculator, this also is likely to be an undocumented revolution.
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Literature Cited
4. Y o w , J.A.; W o r d , C. H.J Chem. Ed=. 1071.48 795-196.
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8. S f e l h I t High Perfmmsnce Systems: Hanover, NH,19W. 9. Fox,S. I. XumonPhy~iology,4th ed.; W.C. Bmm: hbuque, IA, 1993;pp 622623.
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