Prompts

With remote classes and my reliance on the LMS, I’ve been thinking of more ways to engage my students since we can’t meet in person. One thing I’ve started doing is to require students visit me in Zoom office hours at least once early in the semester for a 3-5 minute chat. It’s a meet-and-greet sort of thing, and the students already know what I’ll ask them about beforehand (since they’ve introduced themselves on the Discussion Board as a first assignment). I’m enjoying meeting the students, learning how to pronounce their preferred names correctly, and learning about some of their interests and motivations.

 

The other thing I’m doing is trying to utilize the Discussion Board to help students as a community think about chemistry. Last semester, the Discussion Board was much more open-ended. I had general guidelines at the beginning of the semester, and while postings had something to do with chemistry (and affirming other people’s good ideas), the particularity of the content was left open. I think this worked well for some people, and about two thirds of folks showed lively participation, but there was much less from the remaining third.

 

This semester I’m trying to focus the discussion a bit more by providing a prompt each week. To facilitate continued discussion, prompts have to be somewhat open-ended. I’ve decided, as a start, to connect these to some of the more abstract conceptual things we’re doing in class.

 

My honors G-Chem class makes many explicit connections to biology because most of the students are simultaneously taking a bioenergetics Honors course. Our first prompt (last week) was:

 

In class on Monday, we discussed definitions of Life and definitions of Energy, and how both are difficult to define. How might the two be connected? Could one be discussed in terms of the other? Or are they two separate yet related concepts?

 

I kicked off the discussion with a quote: "As it is usually rather difficult to produce good definitions for rather general concepts, we have to let examples guide us on our way." [by Hans Primas, in Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics and Reductionism, 1982] There was some good discussion. One of the students mused: “…all living things obtain some sort of energy, which in an essence is what gives them life. Energy is also what allows life to reproduce, and the lack of any energy would mean an object is not living. However, this is somewhat confusing because when something dies, where does the energy go? Since energy cannot be destroyed it cannot die with life…” This sparked off some good discussion about the transformation of energy as things die or decay and other students brought up some relevant examples.

 

Another student who is taking an intro philosophy class and just read about Thales (who comes up in my first day of G-Chem) had this to say about Thales’ musing about soul and motion. “I think that a better way to interpret Thales' original theory is that life harnesses energy in a never-ending cycle of contorting both life and energy into something different.” The student jumped off a comment from another student who brought up the “intertwining” of energy and life. I particularly liked the idea of “contorting” from the thermodynamic point of view of how thermodynamic “machines” might be created. This is something I’ve been musing about myself! Anyway, here’s the follow-up prompt for this week.

 

While the nature of energy is nebulous, and yet can be "counted", we use models to examine the movement of energy as it pertains to chemistry. The thermodynamic universe is a model, as are its parts, as are the models used to represent its parts, and so on. What do you think are some advantages and disadvantages of models and representations that we use to track and measure energy? (Pick a model or an aspect of a model and comment.)

 

At the moment I’m using different prompts in my regular G-Chem section because I’m covering the material a little differently (but with much overlap) and hopefully I don’t confuse myself. Here’s the prompt the other group is discussing.

 

On our first day of class we discussed different forms of energy and how they might be related to each other. Most scientists recognize two broad energy categories: potential and kinetic energy. Other "types" are then related to one of these. But there may not be a clean-cut way to classify energy types as being associated with just one of the two in some cases. Discuss a type of energy you have come across (it doesn't have to be from this class) and how it may or may not fall into one (or both) of the categories.

 

I don’t have an over-arching plan for the prompts and I haven’t thought about the prompts too far in advance, although I’d like there to be a general thread linking them. I’m adopting a wait-and-see approach to figure out what sorts of things work best. Trial and error, I suppose.