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

17 August 2022, Version 1

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, non-linear 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.

Content

Supplementary materials

Supporting Information
Notes on Twine CYOA Activity Design, Instructions for Using Example Activity, Separations Lab Course Materials, Survey Instrument, and Course Evaluation Comments
CYOA Separations Activity
Twine Choose-Your-Own Adventure activity that can be converted to and html file and opened in any browser to play or can be opened in Twine (twinery.org) to see underlying structure and code.

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