The Development, Use, and Evaluation of Digital Games and Quizzes in an Introductory Course on Organic Chemistry for Preservice Chemistry Teachers

Abstract

Due to the COVID pandemic, the introductory course on organic chemistry was developed and conducted as an online course. To ensure methodical variety in this course, educational games and quizzes have been developed, used, and evaluated. The attendance of the course, and therefore also the use of the quizzes and games, was voluntary. The quizzes’ main goal was to give the students the opportunity to check whether they had memorized the knowledge needed in the course. Another goal was to make transparent which knowledge the students should memorize by rote. The evaluation shows that the students had not internalized all knowledge which they should apply in several tasks on organic chemistry. They answered multiselect questions in general less well than single-select questions. The games should combine fun with learning. The evaluation of the games shows that the students rated them very well. The students used those games again for their exam preparation, as the monitoring of accessing the games showed. Students’ experiences with using electronic devices in general or for quizzes and games have also been evaluated, because their experience could influence the students’ assessment of the quizzes and games used in our study. However, the students used electronic devices regularly and should therefore be technically competent to use our quizzes and games. The evaluation showed that the use of digital games for learning purposes is not very common, neither at school nor at university, although the students had worked with such tools before. The students are also very interested in using and developing such digital games not only for their own study, but also for their future work at school.