 |
About the
Making of Conceptual Chemistry Alive!
Conceptual Chemistry Alive! grew out of a distance learning program
created by the author, John Suchocki, for his students at Leeward
Community College in Pearl City, Hawaii. It began in 1993 as a cable
television course, which became popular among students and thousands
of non-students across the island of Oahu.
The popularity of the course grew even further when, in 1995, John
recruited two of his former students, Kai and Maile, to help him
in exploring chemistry in the community and in encouraging viewers
to perform chemistry experiments at home. Eventually other campuses
in Hawaii, as well as California, began broadcasting recent video
recordings for their credit courses. It had been noted that television
was not the ideal medium for delivering this chemistry class to
students. As computer technologies progressed, many students began
to inquire about the possibility of viewing the class using their
computers. This prompted the creation of a new company, Conceptual
Productions, whose goal was to film Conceptual Chemistry Alive!
in a digital format. Such a format would provide high quality video
and be amenable to both CD-ROM and DVD and also allow the creation
of traditional VHS.
The digital filming and editing of Conceptual Chemistry Alive! took
11 months from December 2000 to October 2001. The filming took place
at Mosquitos studios in Kailua, Hawaii, so named because of all
the mosquitos that bred from the ever-flowing sprinkler systems
of the neighbors. It was just a house we rented, really. Interestingly,
we had to film at night, which was when the noise of cars passing
by was minimal. Listen carefully to the Chapter 3 intro for a case
where we weren't able to edit out the car sounds.
The building
of the Conceptual Chemistry Alive! computer code (that which
you don't see) and user interface (that which you do see) began
under the skillful direction of chemistry professor and
computer wiz, Michael Reese. The code and interface have since undergone
many revisions, each of which required many more rounds of class-testing.
We are most pleased and elated by the stability and user-friendliness
of the resulting version 3.0 on DVD-ROM, which was released in July 2006.
With your kind input and emails to our technical division, we look
forward to further improvements.
Thank you for your interest and support!
|
