To help understand ionic bonding, Jennifer Conder’s Chemistry class students created raps/parodies as a project. Students submitted their songs through videos.

Students worked in groups of four and Conder graded on content, artistry, and creativity in their videos. Her students had free range when it came to choosing the song and creating their video.

“It was a very interesting experience,” Starkus said. “I don’t have a song writing background so it was difficult to find words that rhyme or that could work together to make sense but also flow as a song, but I loved listening to everyone’s and seeing how the other groups decided to do their songs.”

Although online challenges, such as misunderstanding concepts and falling behind were a possibility, this assignment allowed students to experience new ways for comprehending the material.

“Some challenges were that with it all being over the internet, there was a lot of miscommunication and a lot of difficulties assigning parts and getting it all done in time,” Starkus said. “Being put in breakout rooms helped because it gave us the time to talk and work together in case we didn’t know what to do and so that we could all talk to each other to complete the assignment as a whole.”

After all the videos were submitted, Conder put them on a shared document and let students go through and listen to each of them. Each video expressed the group’s different approaches, so no two videos were alike.

“It was really cool to see how all the other groups decided to do their videos,” sophomore Yursa Shafique said. “I liked my groups the best because we spent a lot of time putting it together and coming up with lyrics.”

Continuing on with the school year, Conder’s next unit is on chemical equations.

“I’m excited to start the new unit,” sophomore Madisyn Rollf said. “I hope that we do something like this again since it wasn’t just a boring project, and since we got to work in groups I hope we do that again too. I’m worried it might be boring after we just got to write our own songs, but I’m sure it will be cool.”