How online challenges are helping to stretch student chemists

Dr Peter Wothers profiles the Cambridge Chemistry Competition - an initiative that aims to extend chemistry knowledge beyond the classroom
Chemistry lesson
Chemistry online: from video footage to online lectures, teachers and students now have access to resources that were unimaginable a decade ago, says Dr Peter Wothers. Photograph:

How online challenges are helping to stretch student chemists


I was recently interviewing prospective students at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where I am the director of studies in chemistry, when something unusual happened. I was genuinely surprised, impressed and, quite frankly, rather taken aback, with the considerable detailed knowledge and level of understanding displayed by one of the candidates when pressed further on a particular topic. To be honest, I would be pleased if some of our second year students were as familiar with these rather subtle ideas. Since I could not imagine this material being taught in school, even in advanced extra-curricular classes, I had to ask how this young interviewee knew it. The answer was that the candidate had participated in an online competition and had had to research around the topic online in order to answer some of the questions.

Obviously, it was fortuitous that these research efforts paid off and could be applied in my interview, but it was still very impressive that the candidate understood the material, remembered it, recognised how it was related to the topic in discussion, and managed successfully to apply what had been learnt. This got me thinking about the power of the fantastic virtual resources so readily available to today's students. All that is needed is some guidance and direction as to where to look, and what to look for.

Two years ago, a group of keen university academics, school teachers and I started one such online chemistry competition, the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge. At the unsociable UK time of one second past midnight on the first of the month, we post five chemistry questions on the web. Each new question is only revealed after correctly answering the previous one, and the level of difficulty gradually increases.

The online challenge is open to anyone, at any age, from anywhere in the world. In addition, there's a 90 minute written exam for UK students who take part in the Cambridge Chemistry Lower Sixth competition. Students are entered by their teachers, which gets the school involved and motivates more students from the same school to sign up for the competition. The exam is developed by experienced teachers and lecturers and takes year 12 students significantly beyond the chemistry syllabus and encourages them to think about science in the way they would at university.

Of course, with the internet on hand and no one to stop them, participants of the online challenge could 'cheat' and look things up online. But this is exactly what we rely on. It has never previously been possible for just anyone to have access to so much data so easily. Not long ago, anyone wanting to know, for example, the boiling point of sulfur would probably have had to visit their local library and trawl through a few encyclopaedias or specialised text books. Now on typing 'boiling point of sulfur' into Google, the answer 444.7 ⁰C instantly appears. This means our committee has to be inventive in exactly what we ask, we need to devise Google-proof questions. Rather than asking simple factual questions, we have to think of questions where any necessary data can be looked up, but the student still has to work out what to look up, and how to apply the information to solve the problem.

Interestingly, we found that this poses new problems that we didn't initially foresee. Usually when setting an exam, all the necessary data is provided either in the question, or in an accompanying data booklet. This means the examiner knows precisely what the expected answer will be. When students are able to go and use a variety of different sources, correct answers vary depending on the data used.

A fact often overlooked in schools is that our scientific knowledge is ultimately based on experimental observations. The problem is that different research groups using different experimental methods will often come up with slightly different values for the same process. With luck, different methods should all give consistent results, but in reality, there is always some level of disagreement or uncertainty. As an example, one of the questions we thought up involved the boiling point of gold. However, this is technically very difficult to measure and 'good' literature values vary by a few hundred degree centigrade. Correct answers to questions relying on such data now needed to be rather more flexible than we had been used to when setting other exams.

Teachers and students now have resources available to them that were unimaginable a generation ago, including video footage of experiments or material that could not be brought into a classroom, access to lectures given by some of world's best teachers, and more facts than anyone could possibly digest. What is needed is a little guidance of what to look for. We recently asked the winning students from our competition, who attended a reception at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, to give a short presentation on a chemical element. The presentations were truly excellent and I was pleasantly surprised to learn a few new facts.

I think it is fair to say that the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge has provided teachers with a different way to motivate their students and encourage them to engage in the sciences outside of the curriculum. Cambridge International Examinations and OCR were keen to support the competition since they recognised that it encouraged the development of skills they were hoping to enhance through their Pre-U chemistry course, an alternative to A-levels. The ability to assimilate information, apply it to unfamiliar situations and think through problems are highly valued by both universities and future employers. A skilful display of such abilities cannot fail to impress during a university admissions interview.

Dr Peter Wothers is a teaching fellow in the department of chemistry, University of Cambridge and a fellow and director of studies in chemistry at St Catharine's College. Dr Wothers is on the committee for the Chemistry Olympiad, organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry, setting challenging papers for year 13 students. He will deliver the Royal Institution 2012 Christmas Lectures.

The past paper from the 2012 Cambridge Chemistry Lower Sixth Competition is available on the Guardian Teacher Network here, there is also a student answer book and marking scheme available for download.
