Chemical Education Today
From Past Issues
May the Best Chemist Win! by Kathryn R. Williams
When I first learned about this year’s National Chemistry Week theme, “Having a Ball with Chemistry”, my thoughts immediately turned to applications of chemistry in sports: polymers in items as diverse as bathing suits and bowling balls; metal alloys in golf clubs, baseball bats, and bicycle frames; UV-absorbing compounds in sun screens; NSAID’s in pain relievers; even the controversial steroids in body-building concoctions. The article “Modern Sport and Chemistry: What a Chemically Aware Sports Fanatic Should Know”, published in 2002 (1) and updated in this issue (2), describes many of the ways that synthetic chemicals and composites contribute to all types of sports. Wanting to find materials published earlier than the 21st century, I continued looking in the JCE online index as well as via the page-flipping mechanism. As I did, my path took a oneeighty. Instead of applications of chemistry in sports, my focus turned to applications of sports in chemistry, especially chemical education. This article touches on a few of the examples I found in my journeys through previous issues. Games and Puzzles Instructional games and puzzles have been popular since the early days of the Journal. In 1924, JCE’s inaugural year, Fred Cope’s “Play Ball in Chemistry” (3) described the Virginia (MN) Junior College baseball league with sections of general chemistry as the teams. Pairs of teams competed in six-week games scored via an intricate procedure that only a baseball fan could conjure: fielding average = average of weekly lab grades; batting average = quiz average; pinch hitting ability = term exam grade; home run = 100% quiz score. According to Cope, “Students went into it with enthusiasm, and knocked home runs with that same feeling of pride and glory that an athlete feels who has accomplished similar results on the field.” Crossword puzzles became regular features in American newspapers in the 1920s (4), and it didn’t take long for the craze to enter the classroom scene. Ruth Van Vleet, a teacher in the Hollywood, CA, high school capitalized on students’ enthusiasm for words and definitions by having the school offer a cash prize to the puzzle fan who wrote the best crossword containing chemical terms and symbols. A sample student creation can be found in Van Vleet’s 1925 JCE article (5), and additional chemistry crosswords can be found in the same volume (6, 7). Other types of puzzles and pastimes appeared in “The Chemistry Student”, a 10- to 20-page section of the Journal in 1928–1930. A From Past Issues article from 1999 describes a few examples (8). That same issue contains a contribution by Jeanne Russell entitled “Using Games To Teach Chemistry” (9). Russell searched a wide range of sources for instructional games, including JCE, Project SERAPHIM, and commercial distributors. Her paper is a bibliography arranged by level and content area, with a brief description of each game.
1314
From Sports to Chemistry In the examples cited above, the game has served as a medium to spark student interest and teach a range of chemical facts. Other articles have focused on action sports and what they can teach us about chemistry. Russell Larsen (10) used the sport of running as a model for concepts of chemical kinetics, with the runner’s velocity correlating to reaction rate, and the order indicating the dependence of the runner’s velocity on the distance to the end of the race. Larsen’s analysis showed that the order must be very close to zero (almost constant speed throughout the entire race) for the runner to be competitive. Using statistics from the 1978 Boston Marathon, Larsen calculated that the running orders of the first ten finishers varied from 1/512 to 1/16, all very close to zero order. In a second contribution (11), Larsen analyzed the legendary contest between the tortoise and the hare. His scenario assumed a total distance of 10 miles (100 laps of a 1/10th mile track), with the tortoise as a zero-order runner at 3 miles/hr, and the hare as first-order runner with initial speed of 5.5 miles/hr. Figure 1 shows Larsen’s plots of distance (given as number of laps left) versus time for both contestants. Even if the hare had not stopped to take a nap (assumed to occur at the 100-minute mark), the tortoise still would have passed his opponent at the 150-minute mark. Terry L. Helser devised his own gedanken sport, “ping-pong ball torture”, to teach students concepts of enzyme kinetics (12). The make-believe player must catch flying ping-pong balls (the substrate) in his/her hand (enzyme active site) and crush them (product). Using this scenario, Helser showed the effects of
Figure 1. Plots of laps remaining versus time for the tortoise (zeroorder runner) and the hare (first-order runner) (11). Legend has it that the hare stopped to take a nap (assumed at the 100 minute mark) and awoke too late to save the race. Even without the nap, the tortoise would have finished well in advance of the hare (who theoretically would never have reached the finish line).
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 85 No. 10 October 2008 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
Chemical Education Today
various parameters, including enzyme concentration, substrate concentration, and the presence of inhibitors. A totally different application of sports arose from a discussion of the pH of sweat in a general education chemistry course (13). Having heard about pH primarily from shampoo and deodorant advertisers claiming that their products were “pH balanced for a woman”, John Tierney’s students believed that the pH of perspiration must be different for men and women. Finding no gender-specific data in the literature on the pH of sweat, Tierney and a group of coworkers measured the pH of sweat of 18 men and 22 women, who were exercise science students, after a 20-minute workout. The findings (sweat pH varied from 6.1 to 6.7 with no dependence on sex) were not terribly thrilling, but the experiment showed how a recreational physical activity can be used to teach chemical concepts (as well as the need for truth in advertising). I conclude with the introductory sentence to Cope’s 1924 description (3) of his chemistry baseball league, “Often chemistry courses involve too much work and not enough play to hold the interest of the average student, while by a slight modification of the methods used much of the work may be changed into play and the same results accomplished with much less expenditure of energy.” May the best chemist win!! Literature Cited 1. Giffin, Guinevere A.; Boone, Steven R.; Cole, Renée S.; McKay, Scott E.; Kopitzke, Robert. Modern Sport and Chemistry: What a Chemically Aware Sports Fanatic Should Know. J. Chem. Educ. 2002, 79, 813–819. 2. McKay, Scott E.; Robbins, Timothy: Cole, Renée S. Modern Sport and Chemistry: What a Golf Fanatic Should Know. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85, 1319–1322. 3. Cope, Fred F. Play Ball in Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 1924, 1, 181–183. 4. Jensen, Sik Cambon. Brief History of Crossword Puzzles, http:// www.crosswordtournament.com/more/wynne.html (accessed May 2008). 5. Van Vleet, Ruth C. Cross Word Puzzles in Hollywood High School. J. Chem. Educ. 1925, 2, 292–294.
“Often chemistry courses involve too much work and not enough play to hold the interest of the average student,…” Fred F. Cope, Play Ball in Chemistry (3)
6. Beardsley, Kenneth D. Chemistry Cross-Word Puzzle. J. Chem. Educ. 1925, 2, 90. 7. Kelsey, E. B. Cross-Word Puzzle. J. Chem. Educ. 1925, 2, 219. 8. Williams, Kathryn R. Contest: What Is Wrong Here. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76, 460. 9. Russell, Jeanne V. Using Games To Teach Chemistry: An Annotated Bibliography. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76, 481–484. 10. Larsen, Russell D. The Kinetics of Running. J. Chem. Educ. 1979, 56, 651–652. 11. Larsen, Russell D. The Hare and the Tortoise: An Apocryphal Closer Look at the Famous Race with a Discussion of Running Rates and Orders. J. Chem. Educ. 1984, 61, 1046–1047. 12. Helser, Terry L. Enzyme Activity: The Ping-Pong Ball Torture Analogy. J. Chem. Educ. 1992, 68, 137. 13. Doran, Daniel; Tierney, John; Varano, Mary; Ware, Susan. A Study of the pH of Perspiration from Male and Female Subjects Exercising in the Gymnasium: A Practical Challenge for Students in the Nonscience Major Class. J. Chem. Educ. 1993, 70, 412–414.
Supporting JCE Online Material
http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2008/Oct/abs1314.html Abstract and keywords Full text (PDF) with links to cited URLs and JCE articles
Kathryn R. Williams is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Florida, P.O. Box 117200, Gainesville, FL 326117200;
[email protected].
© Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 85 No. 10 October 2008 • Journal of Chemical Education
1315
