Integrating Technology with Traditional Teaching Techniques

When you think of a typical chemistry classroom, you might envision a professor filling multiple chalkboards with text, equations, and chemical structures, while students write furiously in their notebooks. This vision is not what you would see if you were to step into the classroom where Bill Buhro, the George E. Pake Professor in Arts & Sciences, teaches Solid-State and Materials Chemistry. Buhro uses the chalkboard, the SMART Board, and the document camera, easily moving between each of these tools. At the same time, his students use both Tablet PCs and traditional notebooks.

This integrated approach has proven effective in improving student learning in this course, in which students must master the ability to visualize, manipulate, and refine three-dimensional crystal structures. In materials science, understanding the crystal structure of a solid-state material is often helpful for understanding its chemical, electrical, optical, or mechanical properties.

In class, Buhro uses PowderCell software on the SMART Board to assemble, rotate, orient, and refine a material’s structure. Refinement entails simulating the powder x-ray diffraction data obtained experimentally to establish the material’s three-dimensional structure and metrical parameters (“lattice constants”). Before Buhro introduced Tablet PCs into this course, he required his students to use the software in homework exercises outside of class. Using Tablet PCs in class, the students now visualize, manipulate, and refine the structures simultaneously with Buhro, who has found this simultaneity makes the students more comfortable with the software. 

Moreover, Buhro has found that the students get vastly improved refinement results when they learn to use the PowderCell software in class, rather than using it only in homework exercises outside of class. Part of the motivation comes from the friendly competition that ensues when students try to get better results than one another. Often, they also get better results than Buhro himself. This progress has carried over to student performance on homework exercises: during the two semesters that he has used the Tablet PCs, Buhro has found that students have “for the first time produced refinements that worked.”

While the SMART Board and Tablet PCs offer new tools for students to master critical skills, they are just two of the tools that Buhro uses. The document camera, a high-quality digital camera that can project photos, books, brochures, transparencies, slides and objects onto the screen, offers him a means of projecting images of the three-dimensional models of chemical structures that have been standard in chemistry courses for decades.

The chalkboard remains an indispensable tool, not only for Buhro to present the equations, data, and other information that his students need to learn, but also for students to learn how to represent three-dimensional structures in two-dimensional drawings. At the same time that his students use the Tablet PCs to analyze structures, they are also writing in their notebooks as Buhro fills the chalkboard, uses the SMART Board, and employs the document camera. Together, these tools help him teach his students to think like chemists: in three dimensions.