Substrate App: Hybridization Exercise
Organic chemistry is considered one of the most difficult classes for pre-med college students. Therefore, I developed the Substrate app which contains games that help students learn organic chemistry.
Context:
The lack of student engagement in STEM is a longstanding problem that is well known to educators. The founders of Substrate Interactive wanted to address this issue by creating a mobile learning platform . I was originally hired as the head of chemical education and tasked with designing the organic chemistry content.
Actions:
Before developing anything, I first conducted customer discovery interviews with over 20 students and professors to understand how students are currently learning organic chemistry. (The remaining 45 interviews were conducted by the team.) The key findings from these interviews were the following:
Many students used their phone to access organic chemistry content
Students felt like lectures and textbooks weren’t sufficient to learn organic chemistry
Professors struggled to get students to apply their knowledge to practice problems, which is proven to yield better grades
Based on the insights above, I led a brainstorm with the team to determine how to address the pain points and decided to prioritize the creation of organic chemistry-based mobile games. As the chemistry expert on the team, I decided that the first game would be focused on hybridization. The goals of this game were 1) Improve test performance and 2) Increase engagement on the topic of hybridization.
In order to build this feature, I did the following:
Validated the hybridization questions that I was writing by asking for feedback on sample questions from 3 organic chemistry professors
Created mockups for the exercise and worked closely with design to translate the mockups to Figma prototypes
Conducted 3 rounds of usability studies on the prototypes with the designer
Wrote 100 hybridization questions and designed the progression, feedback and scoring systems
Wrote all the user stories and performed UAT for this exercise
Outcome:
The Hybridization exercise was released in the Substrate app, which was ultimately downloaded by >1000 users and generated >$3,000 in revenue
To determine if the hybridization exercise met the goals set at the beginning of this project, a study was conducted with students from the University of Arizona
20% increase in test scores observed for students who used the Substrate app versus students who did not
A statistically significant increase in confidence and engagement on the topic of hybridization was observed for students who used the Substrate app versus students who did not
