What is ChemSkill Builder?
ChemSkill Builder generates personalized problem sets for chemistry students.
Each student encounters over 1000 individually generated questions over the course of the 24 chapters matching WCB/McGraw-Hill's chemistry texts.
Student answers are checked immediately, and fully worked-out solutions are presented in response to wrong answers.
Records of student performance are saved on the disk for use by the instructor.
Instructors and ChemSkill Builder:
Chemistry instructors use ChemSkill Builder to
assign significant amounts of homework without the burden of grading, which is handled automatically.
On a typical campus using ChemSkill Builder, over 80% of the students do the homework on a consistent basis.
Valuable lecture time thus need not be devoted to countless repetitions of basic problem-solving techniques.
Students and ChemSkill Builder:
Chemistry students use ChemSkill Builder to learn many basic chemical concepts, as well as how to solve chemical problems.
When they make mistakes, they immediately see complete solutions, and they can repeat assignments until they achieve the score they want.
On each repeat, the types of problems are the same, but the quantities and/or chemical constituents are different, so repetition provides valuable problem-solving practice.
The Survey Facility:
For the instructor's convenience, the survey facility on the Instructor's Introduction and Reference CD allows a quick appraisal of the types of problems in any section.
This provides the instructor with an efficient means of making assignment decisions without having to work through all the problems in a section in order to learn its scope.
The Problem Generator:
Central to the design philosophy of ChemSkill Builder is the concept of problem generation, as opposed to problem storage.
Rather than stored problems, ChemSkill Builder is built around stored problem types, and each personalized problem set for a given student is generated from arrays of chemical constituents and concentrations or quantities using random numbers.
The Chemskil Program:
This is the program that presents personally generated problem sets to students.
It can also be used by the instructor to get a first-hand impression of exactly what information and problem types students will encounter.
The Student Record File:
A student's scores for each of the 4-5 sections in all 24 chapters of ChemSkill Builder are stored in a record file on the student's personal disk.
Data in this file are encrypted to discourage tampering.
Any attempts at tampering that go undetected by the Chemskil program are detected by the GradeMgr program and reported to the instructor.
The Tranzfer Program:
The Tranzfer program is ordinarily installed on a centrally accessible computer where students can bring their personal disks.
This program reads the student record file from the student's disk and merges it into the class file, which in turn is read by the instructor's GradeMgr program.
Both of these programs are provided gratis to faculty using the ChemSkill Builder system.
The Class Record File:
This file is the common repository for the merged student records for all students in the course.
(For large classes, most instructors maintain several class files, one for each section of the class.)
Like individual student record files, class files are encrypted to discourage tampering, and are accessible only via the instructor's GradeMgr program, which is password protected.
The GradeMgr Program:
This program is the means by which the instructor can monitor student performance.
A variety of report formats are available, and reports can be printed out or viewed on the display screen.
The GradeMgr program may also be used to merge homework grades with other spreadsheet-based class records.
GradeMgr is provided gratis to instructors.