BSc Chemistry Education project prize awarded to Angela Draghi

"Learning is doing": Angela Draghi reflects on her experiences designing an educational escape room

Angela Draghi, who recently graduated with her BSc in Chemistry degree, has been awarded the inaugural Final Year BSc Chemistry Education Research Project Prize for a project that adapted two electrochemistry experiments designed by the RSC for use in a chemistry-inspired escape room. Benji Fenech Salerno, the project's PI, sat down with her to talk about the project, and what she learned from it during her time in the Centre for Chemistry Education.

An escape room for electrochemistry 

Angela's project set out to give Year 12 A-level chemistry students an intuitive, hands-on introduction to electrochemistry, and, just as importantly, to get them excited about the subject. Over 7 weeks, Angela adapted the experiments into the initial structure of an escape room, where students must complete a practical task and solve a puzzle to unlock the next stage. The format sits within a much older tradition in educational theory. John Dewey's idea that we learn by doing, developed a century ago, underpins much of today's enthusiasm for gamified and experiential science teaching; escape rooms are, in effect, a modern vehicle for a very old pedagogical instinct. 

To put things in context, she chose to use electrochemistry as her target topic. As Draghi explains it, she commented on a curious gap in the research literature. "There seems to be a gap in current formal research in the area of gamification of science education through escape rooms," she says. "Most of them are conducted with a higher education cohort" even though, in practice, it appears they are primarily designed for use in schools. In part, her project was intended to help close that gap, testing whether the approach is effective as a learning tool for sixth-formers in the UK, and one that may in future feature among the activities run for outreach events by Imperial's department of Chemistry. 

The activity was trialled with 14 students at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, London, UK, working in pairs and supported by their teacher. All the students completed both experiments, and most answered the first set of questions correctly. Fewer managed to finish the second puzzle within the available 60 minutes, a timing issue Angela is candid about, and one she'd look to adjust for in any future iteration. 

Her first experience of research in chemistry education 

When asked why she chose to do a chemistry education project, Angela shared that she likes helping people understand things. She tutored her sister at home and mentored younger pupils at school, and found real satisfaction in watching someone grasp an idea because they understood it, rather than because they'd simply memorised or accepted it. "One of the main reasons why I decided to do a chemistry education project is because I really enjoy making people understand things," she says. "Getting people to actually understand something is just so rewarding, rather than making them blankly accept things or memorise things." It is a distinction with a name in the education literature: rote learning versus the kind of deep, constructivist understanding in which students build new knowledge onto what they already know, rather than absorbing facts wholesale. 

That instinct shaped how she thought about the project's biggest challenge, too. Weaving together three things at once: 1) a genuine practical chemistry experiment, 2) the principles of gamified learning, and 3) the structure of an escape room, proved more challenging than she expected. "We wanted to have an activity that fostered learning in electrochemistry in a gamified way, but on top of that it had to have the bones of an escape room format," she explains. "There's also the practical aspects of an experiment, and then you have to gamify it, and then you have to make it look escape-room-like, and getting all those aspects aligned was a bit difficult." 

Through the experience, Angela got to reflect on the different learning approaches that students exhibit. Her key realisation, watching students work through the activity, was that most of them skipped straight past the written theory and went straight to the experiment. "It wasn't very obvious to me that a lot of learning comes from doing, rather than theorising and theorising and theorising," she reflects. "It was seeing a good proportion of the students get the paper, skim through the theory and get straight onto the experiment that highlighted that, to me." Rather than reading everything up front, Angela observed that many students chose to learn by doing, testing an idea, hitting a wall, and only then working out why. It is a pattern that education researchers have long tried to formalise, from Kolb's experiential learning cycle, which moves between doing and reflecting, to Bruner's idea of scaffolding, in which information is fed to a learner in stages, each one building on the last rather than delivered all at once. It is scaffolding, in effect, that Angela now wishes she had built into the activity more deliberately. "In any future iteration, I'd pepper theoretical information throughout the activity, closer to the tasks it relates to, and scaffold the experience so that each stage naturally unlocks the next," she says. "People have very different ways of learning. The way I structured the activity was very linear, because that's how I learn, but there are lots of students who act, and then go backwards and forwards, in a kind of iterative loop. I hadn't properly thought of that before." 

What the students took away 

Alongside the escape-room mechanics, Angela built in a formal evaluation: a pre- and post-activity test to check whether the intended learning outcomes had landed, plus a qualitative survey on the students' experience. Students generally found the instructions clear and the activity engaging. 

More strikingly, the results qualitatively suggest that students were able to link redox reactions to the thermodynamic idea of spontaneity, a connection that isn't made at GCSE level, and one Angela had specifically hoped the activity would foster. "To the best of my knowledge, that's something they wouldn't have learned at GCSE," she notes, "because at GCSE they learn about redox reactions, but there's not such a direct connection to thermodynamics." Students also shared insight on what they would add to the experience to improve it further. One, for instance, wrote that they "wished they could have had more examples of real-world applications", which Angela agrees would be a valuable addition. 

Bringing the degree full circle 

Angela traces a direct line between the project and her BSc, particularly modules covering thermodynamics and reaction kinetics, which gave her the grounding to construct an activity that was scientifically sound as well as pedagogically effective. "I definitely used the knowledge I gained from studying thermodynamics and reaction kinetics," she says. "It helped me because I knew the topic well. On the other hand, I also had to realise that I had to target the activity for the students." Just as valuable, she adds, were the practical skills picked up over three years of lab-based coursework, such as knowing how to prepare a lab and how to complete a risk assessment, which made the logistics of running the activity, considerably more manageable. 

Having recently completed her BSc degree, Angela reflected that the project has left its mark on how she thinks about learning itself. "To think is to act," she says. "Learning is doing, and how you relate to, and do things with, other people. That's been a big shift in perspective for me." It is, in its way, Dewey's dictum arrived at independently, by a chemist who spent a year trying to teach it to somebody else. 

Angela’s work is an excellent example of how undergraduate research can connect chemistry, education and outreach. It also demonstrates the creativity and educational insight that students can bring to the design of new learning experiences.

With special thanks to Mr Ed Forbes for inviting us to run the activity at Latymer Upper School, and the RSC microscale experiments which were adapted within this work.