Game-Based Application for Helping Students Review Chemical

Technology Report Cite This: J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX

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Game-Based Application for Helping Students Review Chemical Nomenclature in a Fun Way Mary Anne Sousa Lima,† Á lvaro Carvalho Monteiro,‡ Antonio Jose ́ Melo Leite Junior,‡ Izac Sidarta de Andrade Matos,‡ Francisco Serra Oliveira Alexandre,§ Davi Janô Nobre,† Andre ́ Jalles Monteiro,† and Jose ́ Nunes da Silva Júnior*,† †

Departamento de Química Orgânica e Inorgânica, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60451-970 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil Instituto UFC Virtual, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60440-554 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil § Instituto Federal de Educaçaõ , Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará, 63870-000 Boa Viagem, Ceará, Brazil ‡

J. Chem. Educ. Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 95.181.182.187 on 02/27/19. For personal use only.

S Supporting Information *

ABSTRACT: This work provides information about a free-of-charge, trilingual (Portuguese, Spanish, and English), game-based application. The game allows high-school and undergraduate students to review chemical nomenclature in an engaging and fun way on their own by answering random questions from a database with over 700 questions. Student testing revealed that the game design, content, playability, and usefulness was helpful as a complementary didactic tool to aid in traditional study. Assessment of student knowledge gains was performed. The results revealed that students who used the game as a complementary tool had higher performance in tests compared with students who studied nomenclature by only conventional learning methods. KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, First-Year Undergraduate/General, Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Humor/Puzzles/Games, Nomenclature/Units/Symbols

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INTRODUCTION Introductory chemistry courses typically introduce chemical nomenclature early at both the university and secondary-school levels. Students often perceive chemistry as a series of complex rules applied using unfamiliar concepts, which when combined with minimal coverage in class makes learning difficult. Many students will overcome these learning barriers, but other students fail and may abandon the study of chemistry forever. Several works have reported supportive methods that can remove some of the tedium found in the task of naming organic and inorganic compounds and assist the students in their studies.1−13 Studies indicate that games enhance student motivation and learning outcomes significantly and have positive effects on problem-solving, achievement, interest, and engagement in task learning.14−17 When learning activities are combined with the use of games in the classroom, the combination has resulted in higher motivation or better student performance.18,19 There is a growing movement to help students acquire knowledge through interactive learning by using digital technology to enhance the education process.20,21 The application presented in this paper is an example of a game-based application that may aid students in their studies of chemical nomenclature.

(https://goo.gl/YPWZgA) devices using the Unity Platform.22 It is a trilingual (Portuguese, English, and Spanish), free-ofcharge, dynamic, and easy-to-play game that allows students to review chemical nomenclature. The game has been designed so that students win the game with their knowledge and not as a matter of luck. To begin, the player selects a language on the first screen (Figure 1) and then selects “Play”, “Leaderboard”, “Rules”, or “Credits”. When play is initiated, two screens sequentially appear to set up the game parameters. The selected groups of compounds (Figure 2, left) determine the subjects of the questions that appear during the game, and selection of the game mode determines the difficulty of the game (Figure 2, right). In the first three game modes, the player must correctly answer 15 multiple choice questions to win the game. When the player responds correctly (Figure 3, left), a new question appears on the screen. If an incorrect answer is selected, the game reveals the correct answer by making it green, and the game ends (Figure 3, right). During the game, the player can use three types of “lifelines”: (1) switch the question to another, (2) randomly eliminate

GAME A game-based application named Chemical Nomenclature was developed for Android (https://goo.gl/5mH7NY) and IOS

Received: July 8, 2018 Revised: February 14, 2019

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© XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00540 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX

Journal of Chemical Education

Technology Report

Figure 3. Question in beginner mode (left). Wrong response in beginner mode (right).

two of the wrong answers, or (3) randomly eliminate one of the wrong answers. On the basis of the game mode, the number of available lifelines and the time to respond to the questions vary. Once the 15th question is answered correctly, the player wins and is transported to another screen where they can register their name, institution, and country on a leaderboard (Figure 4, left).

Figure 1. Main screen of the game.

Figure 4. Leaderboard screen (left). Final screen in training mode (right).

In training mode, the player must respond sequentially to 30 multiple-choice questions without lifelines, time limitations, or penalties. When the player responds to the last question, the game reports the number of correctly answered questions (Figure 4, right). The game is continually being developed on the basis of user feedback from both students and teachers. Future expansion of the app will add comments to each question to tell students why the answer indicated as correct is the correct one.

Figure 2. Selecting groups of compounds (left) and selecting a game mode (right). B



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Technology Report

in Figure 5 with a Likert-type scale23 for four areas of interest: design, content, playability, and usefulness. In general, the responses to the 12 statements showed high levels of agreement (“agree” and “agree totally”) from those surveyed. Therefore, we believe that the game is dynamic, fun, and easy-to-play and has an attractive design able to capture

STUDENT OPINIONS Undergraduate students (U) from our university (N = 53) and 12th-grade students (HS) from Governador Adauto Bezerra High School (N = 48) tested and evaluated the application. All opinions regarding the application were obtained using a printed survey containing 12 statements. Responses are shown

Figure 5. High school (HS, N = 48) and undergraduate (U, N = 53) students’ responses by survey statement. C



Technology Report

Statistical Analysis

the attention of the player. The questions are clear and wellelaborated and adequately cover the content seen in the classroom. Moreover, the students agree that the game is an innovative didactic tool that can help them review chemical nomenclature. On the basis of results from Fisher’s exact test, significant statistical differences were found in students’ opinions only on statements 1, 9, and 10. The game interface was considered more attractive by high-school students than by undergraduate students (statement 1). This result was not unexpected because younger people spend a significant amount of leisure time each week playing computer games.24 Games in this genre are more attractive than our game. Regarding statements 9 and 10, although the high-school students consider the game dynamic and fun (statement 10) and easy-to-play (statement 9), their agreement with the statements were lower than those of the undergraduate students. The evaluators’ maturity may be influencing their opinions. On the basis of the high-school students’ comments, these students may have misunderstood the concept “easy-to-play” by instead thinking “easy-to-win”. This is possible because they did have more difficulty winning the game compared with the undergraduate students, probably because the game includes difficult questions that are not normally taught to high-school students in Brazil.

A t test for paired samples was used to determine if there was statistical increase in the number of correct answers on the preand posttests for each group (Table 1). Table 1. Comparison of Student Performance Relative to Use of the Application Students’ Average Scoresa Group (N = 48)

Pretest

Posttest

Average-Score Differences

EG1 EG2 CG

10.2 ± 3.3 8.8 ± 3.0 7.9 ± 2.8

14.2 ± 3.8 11.7 ± 3.7 9.5 ± 4.9

4.0b 2.9b 1.6c

a

The scores had a range of 0−25. bp = 0.0001. cp = 0.0169.

There were statistically significant increases in the number of correct answers in all three groups, and these increases had different magnitudes among the groups (p = 0.0339). The difference was greatest between EG1 and CG (p = 0.0190), and there was no significant difference between EG2 and CG (p = 0.1609) or between the EGs (p = 0.1492, Tables 2 and 3). Table 2. One-Way ANOVA on Learning between the Experimental and Control Groups

Evaluation of the Instructional Role of the Game

The evaluation was given to 228 12th-grade students from Governador Adauto Bezerra High School in Fortaleza, Brazil. Three classes were randomly chosen as two experimental groups (EG) and one control group (CG), and the following hypothesis was tested: There is a significant difference between student learning of organic nomenclature supplemented with the application as a complementary educational tool (EG) and traditional student learning with lectures, textbooks, whiteboards, and slideshow presentations (CG). This was an experimental study conducted with controlled pre- and posttests with 20 multiple-choice questions each, which were designed to analyze the effect of the instructional role of the developed game on the learning of the nomenclature of organic compounds at the high-school level. The effectiveness of the game for improving learning of inorganiccompound nomenclature was not evaluated because this content had not been taught by the pretest date.

Variation

Sum of Squares

dF

MS

F Value

p Value

Between groups Error Total

82.45 933.77 1016.22

2 80 82

41.22 11.67 

3.532

0.0339





Table 3. Student’s t Test for Independent Samples for Comparison of the Groups in Terms of StudentPerformance Improvements Groups Compared

Average Difference

Standard Deviation

p Value

EG1−CG EG2−CG EG1−EG2

4.40 2.88 1.63

3.548 2.555 3.835

0.0190 0.1609 0.1962

Given that EG1 had the best average for the pretest and that CG had a lower average for the same test, we can conclude that the application was more efficient among students who already had a better background. Smartphones are powerful computing instruments that are carried in the pockets of a large number of students and are becoming increasingly popular. These devices have many valuable capabilities and tremendous potential for use in chemical education. Because of that, mobile technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in higher education, and software applications (apps) are emerging as a popular platform in many areas, including in the chemistry classroom. The game-based app presented in this paper covers the nomenclature of inorganic and organic compounds and has helped students test their abilities and enhance and improve their learning in an engaging and fun way. In future work, we will design new apps with the same structure as that of the app presented but with new concepts, such as organic reactions and structural theory.

Pretest and Posttest

The pretest was administered to all three groups (one control group and two experimental groups) in the classroom before any lectures about the nomenclature of organic compounds. The aim of this test was to verify the students’ knowledge about the topic. This survey asks students either to identify IUPAC and trivial names from given structures or identify structures from given IUPAC and trivial names. The posttest was also administered to all three groups in the classroom after all groups had five traditional lectures of 50 min each covering the nomenclature of organic compounds. However, there was an important difference: the two experimental groups had access to the application, whereas the control group did not play the game at any time. The aim of this posttest was to verify if there was a significant difference between students’ learning of organic-compound nomenclature via utilization of the application as a complementary teaching tool and students’ learning by traditional lectures. The survey was similar to the pretest and asked students to either identify IUPAC and trivial names from given structures or identify structures from given names. The students had 50 min for each test.

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ASSOCIATED CONTENT

S Supporting Information *

The Supporting Information is available on the ACS Publications website at DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.8b00540. Game screens, survey, pretest, and posttest (PDF, DOCX) D



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Technology Report

(19) Liberatore, M. W. Improved Student Achievement Using Personalized Online Homework. Chem. Eng. Educ. 2011, 45 (3), 184−190. (20) Kim, H.; Chacko, P.; Zhao, J.; Montclare, J. K. Using TouchScreen Technology, Apps, and Blogs to Engage and Sustain High School Students’ Interest in Chemistry Topics. J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91 (11), 1818−1822. (21) Wijtmans, M.; van Rens, L.; van Muijlwijk-Koezen, J. E. Activating Students’ Interest and Participation in Lectures and Practical Courses Using Their Electronic Devices. J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91 (11), 1830−1837. (22) Unity Technologies homepage. https://unity3d.com/ (accessed Feb 2019). (23) Likert, R. A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes. Arch. Psychol. 1932, 22 (140), 55. (24) Mitchel, A.; Savill-Smith, C. The Use of Computer and Video Games for Learning; Learning and Skills Development Agency: London, 2004.

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected]. ORCID

José Nunes da Silva Júnior: 0000-0002-6631-4382 Notes

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

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REFERENCES

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Game-Based Application for Helping Students Review Chemical

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