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A team of chemists and pedagogists from the University of Texas in Dallas are exploring the idea of using the computer game Minecraft as a means to teach chemistry. By doing so, it is hoped that they may also broaden people’s understanding of the chemical industry and the benefits that it brings.

By using the games interactive and problem solving features to set a chemical engineering based challenge, the programmers were able to connect with players in an entertaining way, while also educating them on chemical processes and how chemicals are used to make everyday products.

As the report, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, says, “Imagine a class without lessons, tests and homework, but with missions, quests and teamwork. Video games offer an attractive educational platform because they are designed to be fun and engaging, as opposed to traditional approaches to teaching through lectures and assignments.”

The team, led by Dr. Walter Voit of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, created a ‘mod’ for the game (much as many other Minecraft gamers do), but based the challenges in the game on understanding chemical processes, compounds and elements. This resulted in the development of ‘Polycraft World’, where players must meet goals such as building a pogo stick, by first harvesting and then processing rubber. Or by converting crude oil into jetpack fuel using distillation, chemical synthesis and manufacturing processes. Players are guided by instructions built into the mod, as well as a Wiki Website which advises players on the chemistry and chemical applications needed.

While players are free to return to the Wiki website for advice whenever they need it, experiments showed that players naturally retained information about manufacturing and chemistry simply through game play.

The real challenge in designing the game was in setting the difficulty level correctly. Particularly as the experiments game time lasted for only one hour a week. As Voit said, “If the game is too difficult, people will get frustrated. If it’s too easy, they lose interest. If it’s just right; it’s addicting, it’s engaging, it’s compelling.”

But it seems that the researchers have the level correct, as Dr. Ron Smaldone, an assistant professor of chemistry, who joined the project to give the mod its accuracy as a chemistry teaching tool, tells the University of Texas website, “The demands of the one-hour-a-week class were limited, yet some students went all-out, consuming all this content we put in.”

As Voit explains, “Our goal was to demonstrate the various advantages of presenting educational content in a gaming format.” Adding that, “An immersive, cooperative experience like that of ‘Polycraft World’ may represent the future of education.”

You can find out more about Polycraft World, including the weekly ‘Polycrafter of the Week’ contest, on this YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, the online journal ScienceDaily reports how, “Dr. Christina Thompson, a chemistry lecturer, supervised the course in which the research was conducted, and joined Smaldone in mapping out assembly instructions for increasingly complex compounds. Voit spearheaded a team of programmers that spent a full year on development of the platform. Thompson and Smaldone produced more than 2,000 methods for building more than 100 different polymers from thousands of available chemicals.”

“We’re taking skills ‘Minecraft’ gamers already have — building and assembling things — and applying them to scientific principles we’ve programmed,” Smaldone said. “We’ve had complete non-chemists build factories to build polyether ether ketones, which are crazy hard to synthesize.”

On an educational level, the new method is even more appealing, as it enables teachers to easily understand how much information the students have retained. A point that Smaldone highlights when he said, “With traditional teaching methods, I’d walk into a room of several hundred people, and walk out with the same knowledge of their learning methods. With our method, it’s not just the students learning — it’s the teachers as well, monitoring these player interactions. Even in chemistry, this is a big innovation. Watching how they fail to solve a problem can guide you in how to teach better.”

Voit adds to this, saying, “We can measure what each player is doing at every time, how long it takes them to mix chemicals, if they’re tabbing back and forth to our Wiki, and so on. It gives us all this extra information about how people learn. We can use that to improve teaching.”

Whilst the goal of finding out if a computer game can teach chemistry has obviously been met, the research goes far beyond that. As Voit makes clear, “There’s a preconception among some that video games are an inherent evil. Yet in a rudimentary form, we’ve made a group of non-chemistry students mildly proficient in understanding polymer chemistry. I have no doubt that if you scaled that up to more students, it would still work.”

It is hoped that the mod will prove popular, and other variations of its type will be made. If so, then maybe people’s knowledge of the positive side of chemicals will also improve. Given that chemistry is so little understood and the chemical industry as a whole is greatly misunderstood, then perhaps we should all be adding this game to the Christmas list of those we know and love. Or would you rather play it yourself?

Photo credit: University of Texas in Dallas

Whilst the ability to produce fuels from renewable, organic matter has long been known, chemists are still unable to manufacture higher performance fuels, such as diesel, in an economically feasible way. This is a major problem for the biofuel industry and a global challenge for a world where so many goods sent via diesel engines on trucks and ships have an impact on climate change.

But now bio-engineers may be closer to solving this problem as they have genetically engineered a strain of yeast to convert sugars from organic matter to fats more effectively. While the breakthrough has only increased the process’s efficiency by 30%, it is thought that the research could be a breakthrough to making production of better performing biofuels, including bio-diesel, economically viable.

As professor Gregory Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and one of the lead reseachers in the study conducted at MIT, notes, “Diesel is the preferred fuel because of its high energy density and the high efficiency of the engines that run on diesel. The problem with diesel is that so far it is entirely made from fossil fuels.”

The technical issue, according to the study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, is that, “While microbial factories have been engineered to produce lipids from carbohydrate feedstocks for production of biofuels and oleochemicals, even the best yields obtained to date are insufficient for commercial lipid production.”

While there has been a lot of success in converting cooking oil to biofuel, this feedstock is in relatively short supply. More readily available biofuel feedstock, such as corn and sugar cane, requires converting carbohydrates into lipids, before they can be made into a fuel. The fact that this process is uneconomical when compared to fossil fuels, led the MiT team to look at ways of improving the efficiency of the process. They hope to be able to use cheaper and more abundant organic feedstock to make biodiesel.

The website MiT News explained the achievement as follows, “Stephanopoulos and his colleagues [including fellow leader, MIT postdoc, Kangjian Qiao] began working with a yeast known as Yarrowia lipolytica, which naturally produces large quantities of lipids. They focused on fully utilizing the electrons generated from the breakdown of glucose. To achieve this, they transformed Yarrowia with synthetic pathways that convert surplus NADH, a product of glucose breakdown, to NADPH, which can be used to synthesize lipids. Using this improved pathway, the yeast cells require only two-thirds of the amount of glucose needed by unmodified yeast cells to produce the same amount of oil.”

“It turned out that the combination of two of these pathways gave us the best results that we report in the paper,” Stephanopoulos said. Although the team also admits that, “The actual mechanism of why a couple of these pathways work much better than the others is not well-understood.”

So clearly there is still much work to do before renewable diesel is powering trucks on our highways. However, the researchers are continuing their work, funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, with the ultimate aim of being able to use not just sugar cane and corn starch, but any, “plant material, such as grass and agricultural waste. [Although this] would require converting the cellulose that makes up those plant materials into glucose.”

As Stephanopoulos says, “There is still room for more improvement, and if we push more in this direction, then the process will become even more efficient, requiring even less glucose to produce a gallon of oil. What we’ve done is reach about 75% of this yeast’s potential, and there is an additional 25% that will be subject of follow-up work.”

When and exactly how this last 25% of the goal will be met is unknown, but biotechnology engineers and biofuel manufacturers are keeping a close eye on progress. With governments keen to lower their carbon footprint and dependency on oil, then the work being carried out at MiT could see a renewable biodiesel, at an economically viable process, much sooner than we think.

Photo credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

A group of researchers have developed a battery that is recharged with waste CO₂. The invention’s inexpensive materials and use of a waste product to produce electricity may not only lower energy prices, but also reduce carbon emissions at the same time. Given that power stations are releasing so much carbon dioxide that it is considered a pollutant, this discovery could prove revolutionary.

The breakthrough was made at Pennsylvania State University, where chemists Bruce E. Logan, Christopher A. Gorski and Taeyong Kim, were able to capture the chemical energy in the difference between industrial CO₂ emissions and ambient air. Whilst this has been achieved before, previous efforts produced only low power densities and required expensive ion-exchange membranes. This new technique however, is much more efficient, such that the researchers are hopeful that the process can be scaled up. As Gorski explained, “This work offers an alternative, simpler means to capturing energy from CO₂ emissions compared to existing technologies that require expensive catalyst materials and very high temperatures to convert CO₂ into useful fuels.”

Publishing their results in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology, the research team state that, “The pH-gradient flow cell produced an average power density of 0.82 W/m², which was nearly 200 times higher than values reported using previous approaches.”

Reporting on the breakthrough, the online science journal Phys.org describes the process as follows, “In order to harness the potential energy in this [CO₂] concentration difference, the researchers first dissolved CO₂ gas and ambient air in separate containers of an aqueous solution, in a process called sparging. At the end of this process, the CO₂-sparged solution forms bicarbonate ions, which give it a lower pH of 7.7 compared to the air-sparged solution, which has a pH of 9.4.”

It continues by identifying how the CO₂ solution is then used in a ‘flow cell’ to extract the chemical energy. “After sparging, the researchers injected each solution into one of two channels in a flow cell, creating a pH gradient in the cell. The flow cell has electrodes on opposite sides of the two channels, along with a semi-porous membrane between the two channels that prevents instant mixing while still allowing ions to pass through. Due to the pH difference between the two solutions, various ions pass through the membrane, creating a voltage difference between the two electrodes and causing electrons to flow along a wire connecting the electrodes.”

When the flow cell has been discharged, it can simply be recharged by switching the channels that the solution flows through. By alternating the solution that flows over each electrode, the charging mechanism is reversed so the electrons flow in the opposite direction. This process was found to be repeatable up to 50 times before the cell’s performance deteriorated.

The researchers also found that the higher the pH difference between the two channels, the higher the average energy density. Overall, the results were much better than other pH-gradient flow-cells, but were still some way off the power levels supplied by cells that included other fuels, such as H_2. But the research team is still continuing their study, in the hope that they can prove the technology to be workable on an industrial scale.

“We are currently looking to see how the solution conditions can be optimized to maximize the amount of energy produced,” Gorski said. “We are also investigating if we can dissolve chemicals in the water that exhibit pH-dependent redox properties, thus allowing us to increase the amount of energy that can be recovered. The latter approach would be analogous to a flow battery, which reduces and oxidizes dissolved chemicals in aqueous solutions, except we are causing them to be reduced and oxidized here by changing the solution pH with CO₂.”

Early results prove promising, with Gorski upbeat about the projects potential when he said, “A system containing numerous identical flow cells would be installed at power plants that combust fossil fuels. The flue gas emitted from fossil fuel combustion would need to be pre-cooled, then bubbled through a reservoir of water that can be pumped through the flow cells.”

While, this may seem some way off from a real-world application, many fuel-cell experts are already hailing the discovery as a crucial step towards both cheaper energy and reduced carbon emissions. However, what makes this new design so special is that it has many notable advantages over earlier ‘flow-cell’ models. Its use of inexpensive materials, its operation at ambient temperatures, and above all its use of CO₂ as a feedstock, makes this discovery an attractive and practical possibility for existing power stations.

Photo credit: Logan, Gorski and Kim