Device Use

This week I noticed that over 80% of my P-Chem students this semester use a tablet and stylus to take notes in class. That’s a new record high. Pre-pandemic, the number was below 20%, but the increase in tablet use has been noticeable. In P-Chem, this makes sense. I provide pdf worksheets ahead of time, and the most facile way for students to take notes is to write on the worksheets. Whether you do it old-school with pencil-and-paper or electronically with a tablet and stylus, it’s easier to write than type when lots of math is involved. (Funnily, one might consider the tablet-and-stylus combo very old-school, when those tablets were made of clay.) Students can also turn in their problem sets electronically, and doing the work electronically means not having to take pictures of one’s handwritten scrawl.

 

In my G-Chem classes, there is increased tablet use but still less than 50%. Most students use pencil-and-paper. I write on the board a lot. There are calculations, simple illustrations (Lewis structures for example), chemical equations, along with written-out explanations after I’ve reasoned through a procedure verbally. No one uses a laptop since it’s simply not practical to try and take notes in chemistry class when non-text is involved. I do show some PowerPoint slides, but not many – and they’re usually pictures from the textbook (data tables, graphs, or pretty figures). I expect the number of tablet-users to go up as more and more students use them in high school, and as first-year college students see more of their peers using these devices very effectively for note-taking and working homework problems.

 

In Biochem class, which I’ve only taught once (last semester), almost all the students brought laptops, and a few also had tablets with them. That’s because much of the class is taught through PowerPoint slides. That’s what I did the first time because that’s what my biochemistry colleagues do. It makes sense since there are a lot of hard-to-draw pictures of macromolecules and complicated schemes that would way too long to draw by hand. The slides are provided ahead of time and the students annotate or type as we go along. This works well since the class isn’t equation-heavy. In the few classes where I do more math (full derivation of the Michaelis-Menten equation for example), students pull out a notebook and write by hand or use their tablet. I also encouraged students to bring laptops on the days we would probe protein structures in the Protein Data Bank. I had designed a few in-class activities (and a problem set) for them to get practice using visual tools.

 

Last spring, when I taught the senior-level elective course Metals and Biochemistry which essentially involves reading and discussing primary literature, all the students had either laptops or tablets. This makes sense because pdfs of the papers and the discussion questions are provided ahead of time. Students have also taken notes on their reading and come prepared to discuss. When I taught Origins-Of-Life chemistry during the remote year, we were all boxes on electronic screen, so all of us were on our devices.

 

What have I learned from all this? Students adapt their use of technology to the way I teach and the types of materials I provide. This means I should think carefully as I introduce new activities in class that leverage technology use. Last semester I introduced in-class electronic structure calculations in Quantum Chemistry that used a webserver. Students all brought their laptops/tablets on those class days, and I think it worked well. At some point I’d like to introduce more python but I haven’t jumped in yet because I wanted to think about it more carefully. In G-Chem I’ve made use of students pulling data off the internet or their electronic textbook for in-class activities, but that has been fewer and far-between.  Interestingly, I have increasing number of G-Chem students not having a hand-held scientific calculator. I have to tell them to get one to use in exams. Except for the remote year, all my exams in G-Chem and P-Chem are still old-school pen-and-paper. I expect to stick to this while we continue meeting in person. But who knows what the future holds?