I wanted to share with all of you some experiences I’ve had being involved in a project last year that saw students DIY their own spectrometers for a Chemistry laboratory session.
The story starts further back than that though with my judging of regional and national science competitions in South Africa. I really enjoy interacting with passionate young future scientists as they talk me through their projects although most of these projects are typically found on the internet and replicated for submission to the expos. I’ve never had a huge problem with this aspect of the chosen projects (they are novices after all) but find myself asking the young students what they added to the project? How did they personalize the project? What was lacking from the internet project and how could they improve it? The usual answer I get in return is that students simply don’t have the resources available to build fancy equipment or do elaborate analyses to enrich their projects. This element is of course not always necessary to bolster a project’s results but it did get me thinking about the problem associated with access to what students need to help realize their intended project goals.
This became my inspiration to look into what alternatives exist to access otherwise expensive and unavailable equipment. I chose to work with undergraduate chemistry students in the hopes that their access to younger students in their home towns and old school communities would lead to a ripple effect in terms of delivering a message of how often considered unavailable equipment could in fact become accessible.
Students in a first year undergraduate chemistry course was thus assigned a task of designing and constructing their own low cost versions of a spectrometer (a piece of equipment that typically costs around $5000 – $10 000 for a single unit). Some students came across an article which helped them build such a spectrometer unit using the backlit screen of a computer and a phone app. to analyze RGB colors through the camera on their mobile phones. Amazingly, we were able to obtain very similar results in data analysis to that obtained using a traditional instrument in the laboratory. Part of the rational of having the students not only submit a design of their spectrometers but to actually build prototype versions for testing had to do with me wanting to incorporate a constructionist element in the project. Seymour Papert famously stated that “meaning construction happens particularly well when learners are engaged in building external and sharable artefacts”.
This was such a great DIY learning example that you shared Carla! I appreciated your details on sharing your experience with your undergraduate chemistry students. I have always enjoyed Science Fair but quite often the experiments are just simple activities that the students could reproduce from a book or the internet. Every so often there is a student that is able to push themselves a bit deeper and to expand on a project or find a different way to achieve the outcome. Anytime students can be creative will help deepen their learning. Your example reminded me of a student that was in my school a few years ago. This student took a basic science fair project based on the topic of cancer and went deeper with his learning. He was able to take his experiment and developed an early cancer detection system that can be reproduced for quite cheap. He of course ended up winning an award in the Canadian Science Fair and is now pursuing a medical degree.
Awesome, Carla! I remember discussing this with you last summer, and glad it was successful! Some of my students were going to try it but Covid happened. Still want to try 3D printing model kits, have you tried those yet??
Hi Binal, the 3D printing kits is a project that will have to wait for another day. If the COVID pandemic is set to impact the academic calendar of 2021 in a similar way as it has done this year, I am hoping to work on putting together chemistry kits filled with some activities students could complete from home. These would include some at-home experiments and also projects like the 3D printed kits for assembly of the different molecular geometries as predicted by VSEPR. We’ll definitely stay in touch and compare notes. 🙂
thanks Carla! This is a great introspect on how DIY helps learners advance and make sense of what they are learning. Unfortunately, my experiences growing up and learning was concentrated on achieving high grades as opposed to making myself understand concepts, and working and creating ideas hands on. I’m sure it has changed now to reflect these incorporated ideas. If kids today learn to create, code and build their own world, they would achieve that sense of confidence for sure in developing themselves further in these skills.
I recently went online to revise my Math based skills like calculus etc and I find it easier to understand and follow along with many DIY websites. I think looking back and from how far we have come, DIY has grounded itself in education in a way, perhaps a different layer, which is helping many students, even mature ones like myself!
Luke
Hi Luke, thanks for sharing your story. I agree, DIY learning is definitely here to stay and has helped many of us learn skills either forgotten from school or university (a quick Khan academy video has helped me many a time just to recap simple math concepts like those you mentioned) or new skills (I’m currently taking a MOOC course in machine learning). It’s played a huge role in opening access to education for us all.