Ↄhiral app for iPhone and iPad


4.4 ( 864 ratings )
Games Puzzle Education Educational
Developer: Aaron Esser-Kahn
Free
Current version: 1.6, last update: 7 years ago
First release : 17 Aug 2015
App size: 47.4 Mb

Chiral helps you master organic chemistry using the oldest trick in the book – making it fun. Today’s pockets are full of quick, simple, iterative games that teach you basic spatial reasoning. Chiral takes this model and uses it to teach you chirality. Our method challenges you to answer as many questions as quickly as you can. Race against yourself. Race against your friend. Become a master of chirality. What is Chiral? Chiral is a repetitive problem solver that times you and challenges you to answer one simple question. Chiral?

Why did we develop Chiral? Every year in America more than 200,000 people take organic chemistry. Of those, many seek to learn the material in order to achieve their goal of becoming a professional biomedical researcher or practitioner. Yet nearly half of those who start will not finish or be discouraged from their chosen profession by introductory organic chemistry. Leading to dread of Orgo. Where do students fail or lose interest and passion in organic chemistry? They lose it at chirality. Chirality is the concept of understanding the relationships of objects in three dimensions. Students (that’s you!) entering organic chemistry have never been taught how to think/visualize in three dimensions. Their skillset is underdeveloped as most education focuses on mathematical algebraic representations and concepts. Chiral is our attempt to fix this problem. Chiral is an iterative problem solver that will ask you to rapidly and repetitively train your mind to see and understand relationships in three dimensions using the principles of chirality as a guiding force. Using Chiral you can quickly practice the concepts necessary to succeed and even excel in organic chemistry giving you an edge both in class and in life.

Chiral emerged as a simple solution to the challenge of educating students with only 10 wks to master a wholly new subject while training a new portion of their spatial reasoning.
Chiral is designed to supplement instruction in your organic chemistry course. It wont teach you Chirality, but it will help you master it.

How to Use Chiral: (1) Open Chiral, (2) You will be presented with two molecules or 3D shapes and 3 or 5 choices - Enantiomer, Same, Achiral, Diastereomer, Meso. (3) Based on the principles of stereochemistry select the correct answer - your score is based on accuracy, difficulty and speed. (4) If correct, you will then be prompted to identify the stereochemical configuration (name the chiral center). Using the rules or substituent priority - ID the configuration (R or S) - accuracy, difficulty and speed all boost your score. (5) Move on to the next question, get a higher score and a higher grade!

The quiz will preserve and show the history of your quiz practices, including date and time, score, duration, number of right, wrong, and skipped questions.

About the developers: Prof. Aaron Esser-Kahn is a educator and researcher at UC-Irvine. He has been teaching the concept of Chirality for 5 years as a Professor teaching introductory Orgo and 5 more years as a Teaching Assistant. Prof. Esser-Kahn has been recognized for his achievements in teaching and research including; the AFOSR Young Investigator, NIH New Innovator, Cottrell Scholar, Sloan Fellow, Pew Scholar, DARPA Young Faculty award. For more on his research and passions, see his website at http://www.chem.uci.edu/~esserkahngroup/

Why charge for the app? Because we want to make it better! Chiral is a labor of love from an educator and developer. We are developing a version that includes full 3D rotations, a complete stereochemistry tutorial and a leader-board that allows you play versus your friends at other universities. However, these take time and money. 100% of your purchase goes to improving Chiral and making it a better app. This incredibly modest price makes it easier to fund and develop the app and saves us time from running kickstarter campaigns and asking for donations so we can make a better app.