The obstacles for deaf students to become molecular scientists are shrinking, but it's still hard
Ivan Amato

When Australian-born John W. Cornforth of the University of Sussex, in England, traveled to Oslo in late 1975 to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work that helped clarify how enzymatic reactions control stereochemistry, he couldn't hear a word that was said during the awards ceremony.

"I amused myself by looking around at the audience," Cornforth later told an interviewer with Vega Science Trust, a U.K.-based science communication organization. "I could see in the darkness of the auditorium, these flashes of bright light ... and I couldn't make out what they were. And finally, I realized all the women were wearing their jewels and that was what was causing the flashes of light. And that is what I remember most of all from the ceremony."

The hall's acoustics were fine. Cornforth began losing his hearing in the late 1920s at the age of 10 and had become profoundly deaf within a decade. And in winning the Nobel Prize, Cornforth showed the world that deafness is no barrier to reaching the pinnacle in chemistry.
Aside from the signing, the near absence of spoken words, and the small size of the group, the scene looked like any other chemistry class.

According to the latest workforce data available from the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resources Statistics, 2.6%, or 3,256 of those 124,235 technical professionals in the database who call themselves chemists also describe themselves as deaf, or at least moderately hard-of-hearing. Of 74,643 chemical engineers in this 2003 database, 2,325, or about 3.1%, report having the same hearing disabilities.

For those with the most dramatic hearing deficits, the road to becoming a professional chemist is riddled with extra obstacles. For many of them, even reading high school textbooks can be a challenge.

"By the time deaf students are 18 or 19 years of age, their measured reading ability is generally no better than an average eight- or nine-year-old normally hearing student," says Harry Lang of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology. Lang investigates the cognitive features of learning for deaf students in an effort to identify, develop, and promote effective teaching practices. At most universities, which are not nearly as culturally and technologically attuned to the needs of deaf learners as Rochester Institute, the graduation rate at the baccalaureate level for deaf students is about half that of hearing students. At Rochester Institute, Lang notes, the rate is above 60%, which makes it at least on par with the national average.

As it turns out, of the 30,000 deaf students in postsecondary programs, only a small number each year now choose to follow Cornforth's pathway into chemistry. Keeping this trickle of students moving through academic programs and into the chemical professions-even at places like NTID and Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., one of the country's premier institutions of higher learning explicitly founded and designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students-takes devotion and persistence on the part of students, teachers, and employers.

With about 15 majors in its chemistry program this year, "we have a bumper crop," says Walter E. Trafton Jr., chair of Gallaudet's chemistry and physics program. In a normal year, three or four students will graduate with a chemistry degree. When Trafton, who is not deaf, applied with some trepidation for an opening in the department of physics and chemistry 31 years ago, the same year Cornforth won his Nobel Prize, he couldn't sign a word. A crash course in signing got him partly up to speed, but he says it took a few years to become proficient. "I feel sorry for those students in my first year," he says. Now he signs like the seasoned pro he has become, and he teaches his students with a supply of enthusiasm, devotion, and energy that science teachers know it often takes to keep their students on task.

In his organic chemistry class one day last month, he simultaneously signed and spoke to about a dozen students. Because it's impossible for his students to engage in a heads-up signing conversation while also taking notes with heads-down concentration, Trafton frequently flicked the classroom lights on and off or waved to get everyone's attention as he worked through the interpretation of a half-dozen infrared and NMR spectra that he flashed onto a screen with an overhead projector. Now and again, a student would raise a hand, point to a band in an IR spectrum or a set of peaks in an NMR spectrum, and then sign out the molecular fragment that each corresponds to. In one explanatory bout, Trafton gave the hand sign for C, quickly followed by the sign for O, and then a pair fingers drawn horizontally across the air to indicate a double bond.

Working chemistry into a dramatic story line is intended to ease anxiety about learning the science

The insistent beat of the video game music gets me first. Can I crank up the volume even though I'm at the office?

Courtesy of Gabriela Weaver and Carlos Morales

As the game proceeds, I'm drawn into a dimly lit lab cluttered with large reactors and other equipment. A glowing computer screen shows a flow chart of the reaction I need to carry out, the Haber-Bosch conversion of nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. I get a kick out of blasting obstacles out of my way as I dart around collecting chemical reactants from a storeroom next to the lab. Once I've assembled the reactants and begun the reaction, I check a screen that tracks the status of the process. After eyeing the diagram, I use a phaserlike device to zap one reactor with heat and another with cold. I'm ready for some chemical action.

All this is just from a noninteractive sample clip of a chemistry video game under development at Purdue University. Surely the finished game will be even more engaging, particularly for students.

That's precisely the intent of Gabriela C. Weaver, an associate professor of chemistry, and Carlos R. Morales, an associate professor of computer graphics technology, at Purdue. Weaver described their video game project at the American Chemical Society national meeting last month in Atlanta. Her talk was part of a Division of Chemical Education symposium on alternative sources of learning.

Weaver and Morales began the project by studying students playing various popular commercial video games. "Our goal was to understand the aspects of video games that make them both engaging and self-learning environments," Weaver said. "We would like to see if we can use those characteristics of commercial video games to create a game that has the same level of engagement and interest for students but includes chemistry concepts as some of the story line."

The game, which is aimed at late-high-school and early-college students, isn't intended to replace any formal chemistry education, Weaver noted. "Rather, we're hoping that if we can create this type of a game and it has any kind of popular appeal, then it can serve to lower chemistry anxiety among potential students and set the stage for students to have a more open-minded approach to their chemistry classes and their own abilities to do chemistry."

Brewing up ammonia doesn't sound too exciting, but it's only a small part of the story line. The ammonia is needed to make fertilizer for plants that provide much of the oxygen for the underground facility in which the game takes place.

The game player can adopt the persona of one of three humanoid characters: a male "bruiser," who provides muscle power; a female "mechanic," who can take things apart and reassemble them; or a gender-neutral "psychic," who can read minds and can also tell what has happened recently in a room.

Human scientists in the facility awake the player's chosen humanoid character from cryogenic sleep "because something has gone terribly wrong," Weaver said. The facility was formerly used for manufacturing chemicals with a beneficial purpose. But the robots that carry out the manufacturing process have gone over to the "dark side," taken over the facility, and are now threatening the entire planet by manufacturing a different-and dangerous-product. The game designers haven't decided yet what the beneficial and dangerous products will be, though they will be chemical in nature.

Illustration by Eugene Elkin

Helping Hands Characters in the game include this robot, which is protected from lab hazards by an impermeable coating.

The robots are trying to get rid of the humans in part by damaging the life-support systems in the underground facility. The game revolves around the humans' attempts to fix the life-support systems, get the robots back on their side, and stop them from destroying the planet. Game players help the scientists and can protect themselves from the robots with nonlethal stun guns.

Chemistry appears in the story as both a force for good and an instrument of evil. "In order for a game to be engaging there needs to be a challenge, and the challenge usually includes some sort of danger," Weaver said. "So if we want to keep the story line on chemistry, then we're going to need to use chemistry both for creating the problem and for solving the problem."

So far, Weaver, Morales, and their students have plotted out one level of the game and written the code for one room in that level. Undergraduate volunteers are testing this segment of the game for playability and bugs. "We're also testing it to see if students learn any chemistry from it and what their attitudes are about playing the game," Weaver said. "People who see the game think it's really neat, for the most part. They seem to enjoy it."

Weaver and Morales hope to have the entire first level ready for testing in the fall semester. As currently envisioned, that level will have six rooms and will take about 40-60 minutes to play. The ultimate number of levels "depends on how much funding we get," Weaver said.

The team is primarily funded by a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant, which will last a couple more years. The group has also received small grants from Purdue. But the budget, said Weaver, "is ridiculously low compared to the budget of a commercial game, which is why we are not out to compete with commercial games. We don't have the manpower or the computing power."

The project is intended more as a proof of concept, though Weaver and Morales are sounding out video game firms as well as educational publishers to find out if they would be interested in taking up the game.

The fact that it blends entertainment and education could make the game a difficult sell, however. "The educators say you can't have a video game that teaches chemistry, and the video game people say serious video games don't sell," Weaver said. But she thinks that the commercial distributors are picturing a concept more like a quiz game "where the only goal of the game is to be an educational tool." Instead, she said, "we're trying to make something that is much more of a hybrid, where it has the look and feel and playability of a commercial game, but some of what you happen to be doing is chemistry."

Description
Indian Chemical Engineering (ICE) quarterly journal of Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE) published in two sections A and B. Section A provides an international forum for the presentation of original research, interpretative reviews and discussion of new development in all areas of chemical engineering and allied fields. Papers which describe novel theory and its application to practice are welcome. Reports of carefully executed experimental work, which is soundly interpreted, are also welcome. Section B publishes impartial, generic articles that provide guidance to the practicing chemical engineer, or an overview of some type of technology. It looks for articles that focus on the general chemical engineering problem or situation and the generic method of solving that problem. Appropriate subjects for articles include: design or equipment options; troubleshooting a process unit; assessing the likely impact of emerging technology; reviewing key trends and challenges in engineering research and development and continuing-education.