Monday, September 15, 2003

By Byron Spice, Post-Gazette Science Editor

Chemistry can be tough, but in David Yaron's lab, it is murder. It's not murder in the sense of "This experiment is murder," but as in "This graduate student is dead and it looks like murder."

	David Yaron, an associate professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, has been honored for developing the Virtual Chemistry Laboratory as a teaching tool for students. (John Beale, Post-Gazette)

That's the make-believe scenario outlined in "Mixed Reception," an interactive, computerized exercise for chemistry students developed under the guidance of the very real Yaron, an associate professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University.

Yaron, 41, has been leading an effort to integrate computer simulation into chemistry courses, providing students with more insight into the chemical processes they are studying and, in the case of scenario-based units such as Mixed Reception, making the subject a bit more entertaining.

That development no doubt will be welcomed by students trudging into introductory chemistry classes as the fall semester gets under way.

"It's usually not a popular subject," admitted Yaron, a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon since 1992. "The feeling in the chemistry community is that the freshman course is pretty dismal; it hasn't been restructured for decades."

Yaron was recently recognized for his work to revitalize the chemistry curriculum, taking home the 2003 MERLOT Classic and Editor's Choice awards for exemplary online teaching resources. The honors, presented at the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching international conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, cited him for development of the Virtual Chemistry Laboratory, a computer program that allows students to select from hundreds of standard chemical reagents and combine them anyway they see fit.

	Name: David Yaron Date of birth: Aug. 31, 1962 Place of birth: Scranton In the news: The Carnegie Mellon University chemist was presented the 2003 MERLOT award for his role in developing the Virtual Chemistry Laboratory, which could revolutionize the teaching of chemistry at the high school and college levels. Quote: "With the virtual lab, you can show [students] information about what's happening that you can't see in the real world. In a lot of real-world experiments, you start out with something the looks like water and end up with water." Education: He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre and his doctorate in chemical physics at Harvard University. He had a post-doctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Family: Single. "I work too much."

"He is really revolutionizing the way we educate students," said Richard McCullough, dean of the Mellon College of Science. Chemical and Engineering News selected Yaron as one of its "New Voices in Chemistry" in 2001 and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation presented him its Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award last year.

Yaron is a computational chemist whose research focus has been on developing computer models of organic semiconductors -- polymers and other organic molecules that can act as semiconductors similar to nonorganic materials such as silicon. It's a technology that could lead to new types of flat screen displays for computers and transistors that could be fabricated with machines similar to ink-jet printers.

His computational skills were routed in a different direction about eight years ago, when Jeff Milton, then an undergraduate, expressed an interest in developing educational software.

Chemistry education is fertile ground for interactive computer programs, Yaron said, because the science is so heavily related to mathematics. That can be a problem, because students often have trouble understanding the computations and how they relate to chemicals. In most cases, however, it's possible to create a virtual online experiment that can illustrate the computation.

Chemistry lectures traditionally have been supplemented by lab experiments, but the labs often have not been well-integrated with the lecture topics and fail to underscore the math underlying the experiment.

That led to development -- with the help of almost $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation -- of the virtual chemistry lab.

"With the virtual lab, you can show [students] information about what's happening that you can't see in the real world," Yaron said.

"In a lot of real-world experiments, you start out with something that looks like water and end up with water."

An undergraduate, Donovan Lange, did much of the work on the virtual lab, Yaron said, as did staff member Mike Karabinos and Associate Chemistry Dean Rea Freeland.

The virtual lab is designed so that it can fit into existing chemistry courses, but Yaron's team also is looking at ways of changing the courses themselves, incorporating more scenario-based learning.

The Mixed Reception activity, which was developed in collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, is an example.

The murder mystery, similar to "Clue," requires students to interview witnesses and gather and analyze evidence. It might be useful in both high school and college classes.

Other scenarios have featured real-life problems, such as tracking down the source of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh and, closer to home, finding ways to cope with the acid mine drainage that pollutes many streams.

Eventually, Yaron would like to develop scenarios designed to extend through an entire course, rather than serve as stand-alone units.

Milton, whose undergraduate interest in software got Yaron involved in the first place, is now a paid staff member working on scenario-based learning, a project that has received $650,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation.

The changes in chemistry curricula aren't happening overnight. Thus far, in addition to Carnegie Mellon, the virtual lab has been used by just a handful of universities: West Virginia University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of British Columbia and Mexico's Monterrey Tech.

Yaron also is working to get the scenario-based units into high schools. This summer, he went to the ChemEd conference for science teachers in Auburn, Ala., to promote Mixed Reception.

"We've got about 50 teachers who want to try it," he said.

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