Potions Project: How It Went

Time flies. It was six months ago when I seriously considered the idea of a potions-themed class. A month later I even came up with a name: Magical Potions and How to Design Them. In the end, my non-science-majors chemistry class completed a final project on this theme, but the tie-in was weaker than originally anticipated. Some class time was spent discussing potions, references were made to potions early in the semester, and we covered a fair bit of organic chemistry so that students would recognize interesting molecules they might consider for their potions. I estimate that a third of my class was spent on topics that were relevant to the theme, and the rest was what you’d see in a standard introductory chemistry class (with less math and more pictures).

The outline of the final project can be found here. The majority of students formed pairs to work on their projects, although there were a few trios and a few soloists. Students who started their work early and sent me drafts for the most part had strong entries. Groups that waited to the last minute did less well, although there were still strong entries in cases where I had not seen a draft. (Sending me a draft was optional.) Amazingly I did not have any requests for extensions, and student work was turned in on time! (Final entries were due Monday morning at 8am.)

Here’s what I thought worked well: (1) Covering organic chemistry earlier meant that we talked about relevant molecules sooner. (2) Writing up a full sample of what I was expecting led to better overall quality of the work turned in by the students. There were just a few C+ entries, and the vast majority turned in A or B work. The project was worth 20% of the course grade. There is still a final exam worth 30%. (3) Having students suggest potions as part of a mid-semester homework assignment generated entries for class discussion. (4) Devoting a class to fully discussing the parameters of the project helped students generate lead ideas. Basically, I compiled the list of prior student suggestions. Then students discussed (in groups) a subset of these. It got them thinking about what they would need to consider for different potions. In some cases it also helped students form groups. More than half of the final entries came from the student-generated list although not all of them were discussed in class during that one session. (5) Giving students a deadline by which I would read drafts and return comments. This helped prod some groups to start early with better end results.

Here’s what I thought did not work as well: (1) While I made reference to Potions in several early classes, the theme did not feature strongly in the first two-thirds of the semester. This led to some last-minute scrambling by both me and the students. (2) Having a late start meant that I pushed the original due date of the project into the second half of Finals week, which is also when the students needed to be studying for the final exam. (3) I was not sufficiently clear in explaining students how to leverage the “creative” part of their potion to mesh with known chemistry. I thought it was obvious from the full sample I provided, but I only realized how puzzled they were as I read drafts and answered student questions in my office. And this was right after the last day of formal classes. (4) My original plan was to have students contribute to a Wiki, i.e., we would all write a collaborative “potions textbook”. But not providing the students any prior Wiki exercises meant that they were not comfortable with using the Wiki embedded in the LMS. Students ended up e-mailing in pdfs and so the groups generally worked in isolation from one another.

Would I do something like this again? Yes, but I think the theme needed to be more strongly embedded in the class and I needed to do a better job meshing class content with the final project. I should also restructure the class so students start thinking about the project earlier. Last semester in my General Chemistry class, the students creatively designed a new element and discussed its uses and how it would interact with known elements in our Periodic Table. But in that case, I had scaffolding exercises throughout the semester getting students to think in “alien” ways as they came up with their “alien” element. I should have done this much more strongly this semester. I don’t have a good excuse and I’m not sure why I didn’t do this. Maybe in my mind this project seemed more straightforward.

Highlights: The top entry was a potion that peels away the skin of consumable fruits so that you don’t have to! One of the students shared with me some cool chemistry, which was related, but ultimately not used as part of this project. The entries that got me reading the most for my own interest (and looking up references) were two camouflage potions. Both proposed extractions from magical octopi as part of the recipe, but they took different approaches and concentrated on different molecules in the overall recipe. Several groups made explicit references to Harry Potter books or movies, but other magical or sci-fi worlds also showed up. These were fun to read! I hope the students enjoyed writing them and exercising some creativity.

In closing I leave you with an image from Gryffinroar. This recipe for curing boils does not provide chemical justification, unlike the ones designed my students!