Chemical Quest: general knowledge and popular culture quizzes about the elements in a board game for the class

2.1 Game creation

Gamification has been used in chemistry to motivate and engage students and improve their learning (Dichev & Dicheva, 2017; Nieto-Escamez & Roldán-Tapia, 2021). Although its efficacy is still under debate, many experiences showed positive outcomes (Chans & Portuguez Castro, 2021; da Silva Júnior et al., 2022; Tvarozek & Brza, 2014). With the aim of increasing the interest in chemistry of upper secondary school students through a captivating activity that can show the multiple ties of chemistry with everyday life, we chose to merge the periodic table, chemistry’s most renown symbol and source of information (Scerri, 2019), with one of the most famous trivia games, Trivial Pursuit. The hardest part of creating trivia games is the preparation of the quizzes, because a whole bunch of (often multiple-choice) questions must be provided. In the case of an educational game, writing the quizzes can be an intriguing challenge for the teachers, who can wisely and carefully select topics and tune the level of difficulty thanks to their experience in the class. For these reasons, the 510 quizzes of Chemical Quest were created in a one-day lab for upper secondary school teachers who participated on a voluntary basis. 10 groups of two-three people were created, and 8–10 elements were assigned to each group. Books on the periodic table and chemical elements were available and they could use network facilities to search in the Web. Inter-group collaboration and discussions were established especially when difficulties arose, i.e., the formulation of quizzes for less popular elements and more in general the search of good questions suitable for a general public. The formulation of the questions required accurate research on the assigned elements. The teachers used their experience with the young students to choose the questions, favoring the most interesting, unusual, or incredible, but also trying to tune the level of difficulty, because a too difficult game may generate frustration. Importantly, when the information was retrieved from the Web, the teachers checked carefully the reliability of the source, often looking for the same news elsewhere for confirmation. The Italian version of the game was initially prepared, but few months later the English version was also ready.

2.2 Gameplay

The goal of the game is to move around the board by correctly answering trivia questions. Questions are split into five categories, with each one having its own colour to readily identify itself; these are History (blue), Art, Music, Cinema & Literature (purple), Food, Energy & Life Sciences (yellow), Science & Technology (red), Miscellanea (green). The game includes a plastic (or virtual) board (Figure 1), plastic (or virtual) playing pieces marked with a different colour to distinguish the players/teams, question cards, small plastic (or virtual) beads (the colours of the beads are those of the categories) to fit into the playing pieces, and a die (a big soft one to play in the classroom). These elements are shown in Figure 2. Playing pieces used in Chemical Quest are either weighing bottles, in the board version, or glassware, in the electronic version. A small plastic bead can be placed into each of these pieces to mark each player’s progress.

Figure 1:

The board.

Figure 2:

Die, playing pieces, plastic beads, cards with questions.

The game is played on a board which depicts a distillation apparatus. This track is divided into squares of different colors. It starts at the round-bottom flask and ends at the Erlenmeyer flask. At the bottom center of the board there is a three-neck flask. Before the game starts the deck containing the 102 element cards is shuffled and placed with the side of the cards containing the questions and answers facing down. On each of their turns, players roll a die and move their counter of a number of squares equal to the die roll in any direction following the tubing. When a player’s counter lands on a square, the first card is drawn, the player answers a question according to the color of the square, which corresponds to one of the five categories and the card is put on the bottom of the deck. If the player answers the question correctly, he collects a bead of the same colour which fits into the playing piece. Grey spaces (“roll again”) give an extra roll of the die to the player. When a counter lands on the three-neck flask, the player must answer a question in a category selected by the other players. The player’s turn ends on collecting a bead or after a wrong answer. When a player’s counter lands on a space, but the team already has a bead of that colour, they can try to answer a question correctly to throw the die again, otherwise they can choose to simply stop. If a player chooses to answer the question, but the answer is wrong, the player’s counter is moved back to the square it was in before the die roll. Any number of playing pieces may occupy the same space at the same time. Once a player has collected one bead of each colour and filled up the playing piece, they must reach the end of the distillation apparatus to win the game. The yellow ball in the flask containing the distillate is not a space of the game board and must not be counted.

There is no pre-determined order in which the beads must be collected, and Chemical Quest lets each team or player adopt the most convenient strategy to collect all five coloured beads and reach the end of the track.

The core of the game is represented by the 102 cards, each one associated with a chemical element from hydrogen to nobelium. On each card there are five questions with the five corresponding answers. On the back of the card there is a periodic table with the position of the element highlighted. In Figure 3, the nickel card is shown as example. In this case, the History question deals with the origin of the name nickel and the Science & Technology one is about nickel-containing enzymes. They are both multiple-choice questions to give the most knowledgeable players better chance to answer correctly. Conversely, Food, Energy & Life Sciences and Miscellanea questions are open and deal with the use of nickel in everyday life as a component of kitchen tools and the name of 5 cent coins made of nickel, respectively. It is not impossible for students to answer correctly to both questions. In contrast, the Art, Music, Cinema & Literature question is a challenging one because it will be very rare to have students who know that the first commercial cinema in the US opened in Pittsburgh in 1904 was called ‘Nickelodeon’. During the game, questions can be read out by the teacher or by the next player.

Figure 3:

Sample card: nickel, front (a) and back (b).

2.3 Playing in the classroom

The game was played in 24 different upper secondary schools (high schools (licei) and technical institutes), in a total of 44 classes involving students of the second, third or fourth year using the Italian language version. Relevant information such as the number of teams/components per team, the total time, the average number of beads gained, the most difficult/easiest subject, were collected by the teachers who were asked to compile a data sheet which is shown in Table 1.

For convenience, teachers were recommended to set a time limit of 45 min and all matches ended within this time limit. On average, the teams gained at least three beads and no cases were reported of teams with 0 beads at the end of the game. All cards were used. The results collected from the feedback of 542 students are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4:

Feedback by the students who played Chemical Quest.

Most of the participants found the duration of the game suitable or too short, although we believe that the latter choice was provocative. Only 10 % thought that the game was long or too long, and this may be due to lack of interest, or this comment may arise from an excess of dead times during the game. Almost half of the students found the quizzes difficult, but a significant percentage found the level suitable. Indeed, in some cases it is extremely difficult to answer, especially to open questions, but we have intentionally inserted few ‘impossible’ questions to stimulate the competition. The most difficult categories are not directly related to science, but rather to historical aspects and art, music, cinema, and literature. More than 70 % students have been highly enthusiastic/enthusiastic about the game, and more than 60 % have declared that they have learnt some chemistry of the elements. It is important to stress that the teachers have collected the feedback of the students in the class after playing Chemical Quest and have not organized any evaluation. Thus, the level of learning here reported merely reflects the perception of the students. On the other hand, our main goal was to boost the interest of young students in chemistry by making them aware that chemistry permeates our life. To facilitate the learning process, one should investigate what they have learnt playing Chemical Quest, or, even better, evaluate with specific tests the level of knowledge about the elements of the periodic table before and after playing Chemical Quest.

Finally, taking into account also the feedback received by the teachers, the following observations can be drawn: (1) the most difficult questions definitely belong to the blue and purple categories, which are not the ‘scientific’ categories; (2) on average each team gained at least three beads; on average teams of older students earned more beads; (3) the game is highly appreciated by the students and the teachers detected an efficient increase in interest in the subject; (4) the teachers recognize that Chemical Quest can be used to improve a general knowledge of the chemical elements, but also to relax the students from time to time during the school year; (5) in some cases, two or three students were able to manage the game and so the class became completely independent of the teacher when playing Chemical Quest; (6) questions with multiple answers are preferred over open questions which may be used to open a discussion at the end of the game or to stimulate a search to go into more depth on a particular topic; this would be useful to promote learning.

We also noticed that the rules of the game can be easily adapted by the teachers. For example, some elements can be excluded (lanthanides and actinides) especially when playing with younger students; alternatively, students can use Internet to find answers during the game since it is not straightforward to find all the information required.

2.4 Chemical Quest webpage

In order to make Chemical Quest available for teachers, we have created a web page from which the software version can be downloaded for free (https://pls.scienze.unipd.it/chimica/chemical-quest/). The homepage contains some general information about the PLS project and the game. Registration (name, surname, affiliation and e-mail address) gives access to a private area where the package containing the web version of the game can be downloaded. This contains three archives: the 102 cards in PDF format (English and Italian versions) and the compiled version of the main program. The software is written in Java and can be run both on Windows, macOS, and Linux machines with a working Java virtual machine installed via the respective launch scripts. A full description of the software and its configuration is reported in the Supplementary Information and contained in the archives in the respective README files.

2.5 Chemical Quest at scientific divulgation events

Due to the numerous quizzes of chemical culture, Chemical Quest can be proposed to the general public and thus be used at scientific divulgation events. The increasing importance of university ‘third mission’ activities, which are especially valuable to the establishment of a correct relationship between the society and scientific knowledge and progress, prompted us to organize Chemical Quest matches on several occasions. For example, we have played with adults (age 14–99) at Venetonight Eds 2017, 2018; 2019. Before the pandemic, this regional event was co-organized by three Italian universities, i.e., Padova, Venice and Verona, in conjunction with the European Researchers’ Night in late September. In 2019, Chemical Quest was presented and played at the active poster session of Mendeleev150 in Saint Petersburg, the conference endorsed by IUPAC organized to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the periodic table (Cestaro et al., 2019).