Inter-Twine-d: Combining Organic Chemistry Laboratory and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Games

Abstract

Remote delivery approaches to laboratory courses in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic have included a spectrum spanning passive options such as providing students with prerecorded videos of experiments to replacing in-person laboratory experiences with immersive virtual reality environments. While interactive activities that require students to make choices about experimental design or procedure, mimicking levels of inquiry present in in-person laboratory experiments, are preferred, creating custom activities of this type often require expensive equipment, a media production team, and knowledge of multiple programming languages. The open source, nonlinear storytelling platform, Twine, provides a free alternative that allows instructors to create custom interactive choose-your-own-adventure activities based on their existing laboratory curriculum and inclusive of text, images, and video clips. We used Twine to create a choose-your-own-adventure laboratory activity as the final experiment in a remote delivery format organic chemistry laboratory course that allowed students to obtain customized data based on their experimental choices. We expanded this work to create an entire course of Twine choose-your-own-adventure laboratory activities for a third term organic chemistry laboratory course.

NanoAdventure: Development of a Text-Based Adventure Game in English, Spanish, and Chinese for Communicating about Nanotechnology and the Nanoscale

“…Twine has recently been used as a platform for remote Choose Your Own Adventure Laboratories in organic chemistry. 28 For Nano-Adventure, it was important to include images in the game, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs, to help reader-players visualize the setting of a nanoscale world. While micrographs are helpful for students learning to visualize the nonvisible world, original art was also commissioned to depict a specific scene and emphasize the sense of scale.…”

“…The designer can also enhance the game with pictures and sound. Twine has recently been used as a platform for remote Choose Your Own Adventure Laboratories in organic chemistry . For NanoAdventure, it was important to include images in the game, including scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs, to help reader-players visualize the setting of a nanoscale world.…”

Virtual Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Prelabs Improve Student Understanding of Analytical Chemistry Concepts and Instrumentation

“…18 Other instructors have created virtual learning activities using Twine for laboratory replacements, 19−21 including colleagues in the chemistry department at our institution. 22 These virtual offerings often take the form of a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" (CYOA) style activity, allowing students to make choices and determine if the outcome of those choices was correct or if they should try a different procedure instead. 23 For the period of remote learning, seven CYOA laboratories were generated with Twine, and the resulting HTML files were embedded in pages on our university's Learning Management System.…”

A Murder Mystery Gamification Session to Consolidate Analytical Biochemical Techniques Learning

“…Many researchers have developed games for chemical and biochemical education. Examples include card games to aid memorization, − quiz games, , board games with chemical challenges, − escape rooms, − narrative games, , murder mysteries, , and the use of ChemDraw as a game . Game writing has been used as an educational tool, while Lego and Lego Serious Play have been used to teach scientific concepts.…”