OsmoBeaker

An NSF grant to investigate and develop automated ways of assessing student work within a simulation environment provided funding that helped us produce the first version of our OsmoBeaker program. While it proved difficult to make much progress with assessment techniques on a prototyping grant, the platform we developed created the foundation for our Diffusion and Osmosis labs. We conducted a substantial amount of research looking for common misconceptions among college students on both of these topics, and designed the labs specifically to overcome those misconceptions. Our results are detailed in the paper we published from the grant. For instance, we were quite successful at addressing a common student misconception that some force pushes molecules away from high concentrations, rather than recognizing that diffusion is due to random motion. This is a confusing point that typical wet labs on diffusion and osmosis do not seem to help, but our Diffusion lab often does.