ChemiBold: A Dynamic and Competitive Game for Learning Basic Functional Groups in Organic Chemistry

Abstract

“ChemiBold” was created as a didactic trilingual card game (English, French and Spanish). The general aim of the game is for the players to learn to identify 11 functional groups, as well as to learn additional information about each substance displayed on each card’s reverse side. In “ChemiBold”, teams of two players aim to collect compound cards that match the functional groups from two dice that are thrown by the game master in each round. Each correctly identified functional group per card is awarded one point to the team. The team with the highest point count wins the game once there are no more cards on the table. To measure the impact of the game on student learning, it was tested on 67 undergraduate students from the Facultad de Quı́mica at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). To accomplish this, quizzes to evaluate student’s proficiency in the identification of the 11 functional groups targeted in “ChemiBold” were performed before and after playing the game. Through this, it was possible to statistically observe an improvement in the identification of functional groups among the participating students. Taking this into account as well as the survey results obtained regarding playability, content, and usefulness, the initiative was deemed successful as a tool for introductory teaching of functional groups.