tl;dr: Our approach to business games worked for teaching chemistry concepts. This is how we broke down stoichiometry and now you can try it out!
It was approaching midnight when the request came in from a young relative: do you know anything about stoichiometry? Like most of us, I knew something about stoichiometry decades ago. But the gauntlet had been thrown, and soon I was reading a high school textbook trying to make heads or tails of the assignment – conversion factors. Luckily, like riding a bike, some concepts you never forget and at the end of the night we were canceling out units with ease – while mapping out a game to teach her friends. It’s that last part that we’ll profile here since it sheds some light on what we do and how we do it.
A spoonful of sugar that is all it takes, It changes bread and water into tea and cakes
SimCase has always endeavored to build bite-size experiences. In part, because it made them easy to add to an existing syllabus. More importantly, it was because it allowed the learner to focus on one core concept at a time. This worked for business concepts, and it ended up working for this stoichiometry teaching point as well.
Thankfully, the textbook already separated out conversion units into a sub-section of the chapter, but my niece still had a lot of confusion regarding the units. So we abstracted them out. First we swapped out moles for x, then we traded out molecules for y. We continued replacing scientific units for variables, and by doing so we simplified the complexities of conversion units into some math skills she already knew. Pretty soon she was canceling out units on her own. To ensure she had a firm grasp of the concept, we then did a few exercises with the original units intact…and just like that, she now thought the concept was straightforward.
Yet in every job that must be done, There is an element of fun
While she was using the remaining problem set to show-off her new stoichiometry skills, I started thinking about how we could communicate this same abstraction to her friends since she made it clear that she wasn’t the only one struggling with this assignment. We were in Miami at the time, so it was only fitting that our very own ‘Domino Park’ provided the inspiration. It turns out that domino games have a similar cancel out dynamic. You connect sections with the same number of dots, and continue forward with the number of dots on the unpaired section. By using dominos as the medium, even students who didn’t love math as much as my niece had a familiar abstraction that they could use to unlock one of the building blocks that form the foundation for stoichiometry.
You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game
With the concept in mind, we fired up our LLM and began to iterate. This process forces you to define a lot of the transitions and details necessary when building software, while building visuals using words is a skill that we continue to perfect. It took a couple of days, but the end result was “Stochi-Omino”. It’s dominos, but oriented to fit the classic stoichiometry layout. When you cancel out diagonals you get color-coded feedback. Once you arrive at the desired ‘units’ the game ends, but hopefully the learning continues. Try it out for yourself:
And every task you undertake. Becomes a piece of cake
Thankfully, initial feedback was positive, from both her teenage peers as well as her more traditional chemistry teacher. In the next version, we want to add a ‘chemistry units’ toggle to bring the moles and molecules back into the game once the concept is clear. I am also encouraging her to try and build her own game that breaks down the next challenging concept in the course. In any case, my hope is that it breaks down a barrier to learning chemistry, just like our games break down barriers to learning business.
If you have feedback or would prefer a live walkthrough for this mini-game or a larger SimCase, you can reach out to us here ([email protected]). We’d love to hear from you.
