How to revise anything, particularly organic chemistry

If you are a student studying chemistry or an adult that wants to know more, you have come to the right place.

Below you can find: (1) a list of?videos?to help you understand organic chemistry better, including interviews from three world-leading scientists; (2) A?reading list?of the books I refer to in the videos and, (3) If you are a teacher and interested in doing something similar,?teachers notes?to help you.

These videos were originally produced as part of?Chemistry Champions, a 6-part online course for young adults interested in studying chemistry. Given the success of the project (700+ student sign-ups, 93% satisfaction score overall, and an incredible amount of thankyou messages) we decided it would be a shame not to share them online.

The videos start by teaching you how to improve your ability to learn or revise anything (see video 1). They then go into significant detail on chemistry, particularly?organic?chemistry. I have structured the lessons so that you will learn the key parts first- these might help you with anything from cooking better to understanding how a medicine works.

Special thanks must go to: Billy Boyle, CEO of Owlstone Medical; Professor Angela Russell, Oxford University and Professor Sarah Tabrizi, University College London. All three are world-leading scientists who very kindly gave their time to be interviewed as part of the series. Their interviews, which can be found in the last two lessons, cover both their incredible research and the career decisions they made to get there.?Useful viewing if you are thinking about what to do next.

The work was supported by a great team at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) and funded by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Special thanks must go to Grace Mackintosh Sim at the RVC, co-creator of Chemistry Champions, without whom, the project would not have started. Likewise thanks to Lucy Eckersley, who helped to present some of the episodes.

For those of you who are considering running something similar, I have also added a part below the videos on collecting feedback using?Airtable .

Throughout the course I sent out a weekly anonymous quiz that I built using the Airtable platform, which is free. I would then present what the students had said back to them at the start of the next lesson. It was a fairly high-risk option to request weekly constructive criticism of my lessons from an army of teenagers trapped in a Covid-lockdown nightmare. I was worried they would have a lot to complain about, particularly considering the significant range in age, syllabus and career plans across the audience.

Thankfully, it paid off. The regular presentation of what they didn’t like about the last lesson kept them engaged and made them a much bigger part of the lessons. Their feedback was excellent and my lessons were a lot better thanks to all of their helpful comments.

I hope you enjoy watching!

If you would like me to do more in future or have any ideas for other things you would like to explained in chemistry — I would love hear from you.

You can get in touch?with this form .

Francis

Chemistry Champions Videos

Episode 1: Intro & optimising your ability to learn anything

This video is both an introduction to the course, a bit about me and the cohort followed by a detailed summary of all the important aspects to learning and revision built through conversations with experts in nutrition, psychology and exercise. My thanks to Areti Smaragdi PhD, Catherine Kidd, MSC PGDIP RD and Grace Mackintosh Sim, PhD for sharing their collective wisdom.

Episode 2: Drawing molecular structures

This video is probably the best one to watch if you want to understand organic chemistry better. It isn’t a linguistic science, it’s visual: it’s a lot more like an art degree than an English one. So, avoiding a lot of stuffy boring information this lesson covers exactly what the drawings mean and how to draw them.?Start here as the future videos build on these drawings.

Episode 3: Chemistry Fundamentals

In the last video we cover how to draw organic molecules, in this one we look at “uploading” more information onto those drawings. If the last video was about understanding what the drawings mean, this one is about being able to predict the function of organic molecules. All of the important fundamental forces are described in a way that will hopefully allow you (in combination with the last video) to begin to do that.

Episode 4: Connecting theory with reality — Energetics and the Mole

In this lesson we focus on connecting theory with reality. Chemistry is utterly pointless if you leave on a shelf or in your head. Once you have built the bridge between theory and real-world applications you might start to enjoy it more.

Episode 5: Analysis and Detection

This is a focused lesson on analysis and detection that may be particularly useful for those in a health care / biological setting. At the end of the video there is a fantastic interview with Billy Boyle, CEO of Owlstone Medical. This video is somewhat standalone so you may be able to watch without the others. If you struggle, videos 2 and 3 will definitely help.

This also includes a fantastic interview with Billy Boyle, CEO of Owlstone Medical — who talks about his company’s mission to save 100000 lives, the technologies they are developing to achieve this and his career path and decisions to get there.

Episode 6: Biotechnology and Advanced Medicine

This final video mainly features interviews with two incredible scientists, with explanations of their work, discussions about the decisions that got them to where they are and a final wrap up of the Course. This episode also includes two excellent interviews.

The first is with Professor Sarah Tabrizi, who talks about her ground breaking research on novel cures for Huntington’s, her impressive research approach, which spans both bench work and clinical research, as well as her career path to get there.

The second interview is with Professor Angela Russell, who shares a wealth of insight from her work as an organic chemist, the significant impact it is having in a number of healthcare fields and the journey of launching the company she co-founded — Oxstem

Reading List

Below you can find the list of books I recommended during the course. If they are not loading properly, you can also?find them here

Teachers Notes

Encouraging a system of good feedback, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to engage with your pupils, encourage them to grow and eventually — learn independently.

Chemistry is an incredibly visual subject. One of the best ways I have found for my pupils to individually check what they have learned is using “The Paper Test”.

One of the best ways for your pupils to check if they have actually learned something is to get them to draw it out on blank paper — without any access to their books their teacher. This process of testing generates an individual feedback loop that is useful for life-long learning.

You can mark what they have drawn or, even better they can mark it first then you can compare your marking with theirs.

The Paper Test

1. Take something you need to be able to draw for your own exams (e.g. GCSE, A level etc.) that you are struggling to remember.

2. look at it for a bit in your textbook then close your text book, wait 10 minutes and without looking again try to draw it entirely from memory

3. Check your work and mark it (if you are a teacher, at this stage you could ask them to photograph the work and submit through a platform like Airtable)

4. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t drawn it entirely correctly — you are not yet in the exam. Look carefully to see what errors you have made.

5. Close the book and try again. Repeat until you win!

Collecting a score on your teaching

Collecting a score from pupils on your teaching can be uncomfortable! But if you do it correctly, it can be a very helpful way to engage with your class. The first point to make with them is that focusing on bad feedback is good for their own growth/improvement.

In submitting to the same process, yourself, you lead by example and it helps to give pupils a say in what they are learning.

I regularly collect feedback and comments using Airtable then present the findings to the class at the beginning of the lesson.

Collecting homework or setting tasks

The really difficult thing about chemistry champions was that the age range of the pupils was everything from 14–18. This meant that pacing the lessons and ensuring that everyone was getting something out of it was a particular challenge.

In terms of testing, I would recommend testing them both on the work they are doing in the week and 2–3 weeks prior to what they are studying. This helps to build long-term memory

Using a platform like Airtable for feedback and homework

You can build a lot of great things with Airtable. The really cool think is that you can very easily convert a database into a questionnaire for your students.

Students can then submit their responses (which can be ratings, short or long text, dropdown selections or even photos of their own work) via a form, which auto populates your database.

Providing different levels of homework to the same group

If, like me you had a significant age range of students, you can use drop-downs (e.g. Beginner || Medium || Advanced || Fiendish) to allow students to pick the level of work that they want to do.

Here are some examples of forms I built for?creating homework ?and collecting?weekly feedback .

Good luck with your own projects!