For this blog post we’ll go behind the scenes to speak with Beth Nissen, NBCLearn Senior Producer spearheading the project.
Beth is Chief SME (pronounced smee, “Subject Matter Expert”)… and you’ll also meet the undergraduate students who will provide their feedback on the ChemistryNow content. Undergrads are SMEIT (pronounced smeat, “Subject Matter Experts in Training”).
SME corner: Cue the Barbara Walter’s moment with Beth (who prefers to be
called Nissen)…
1. What prompted the creation of the series?
The United Nations proclaimed 2011 the “International Year of Chemistry,” with the purpose of increasing general public understanding of chemistry, and sparking more interest in chemistry in students from university level to middle school. Dozens of the world’s most prominent science organizations are supporting IYC 2011, including the National Science Foundation, with whom NBC Learn has previously partnered to create video series on “The Science of the Winter Olympic Games” and the “Science of NFL Football.” We joined up again on “Chemistry Now,” a weekly video and multimedia content series that’s being released in weekly “bundles” online during the spring and fall school terms in 2011. You can check out the videos at www.nbclearn.com/chemistry and www.science360.gov
2. What are your expectations for the series?
Chemistry has a reputation as a “hard” subject, and it is a difficult science for many students — and adults, even adults with college degrees –mostly because it’s based on abstract concepts, about what it’s impossible to see, like the structure of matter and interactions on a molecular scale. “Chemistry Now” content is designed to link the abstract to the familiar and the everyday — so we look at the chemistry of soap and the chemistry of chocolate; the chemistry of plastics and the chemistry of the synthetic dyes that make your clothes and your shoes and your sheets the color they are. We have a series called “Cheeseburger Chemistry” where we look at the chemistry behind different components of an average cheeseburger: the chemical reactions that turn liquid milk into solid cheese; the role of ethylene in ripening tomatoes; the gas and sugar reactions in the bread dough used to make the bun.
3. What do you hope the audience will take away from the weekly offerings?
First, that chemistry is called “the central science” for a reason: everything we see, touch, eat — and are — is connected to chemistry; is chemistry. Second, that chemistry can, if presented well, be fascinating to anyone who appreciates logic and magic, puzzles and mysteries, exploration and adventure. And third, just how cool, for lack of a better word, 21st century chemistry research is and researchers are — like the Purdue University chemist studying the glue mussels secrete underwater, so he can synthesize a wet-setting adhesive that could be used as a surgical glue or new bone cement. Or the Iowa State chemist — she’s a former clothing designer — who’s using chemistry to piece together new and more efficient solar cells. Or a certain CUNY-AMNH chemist and NYAS blogger who studies how the toxins from venomous snails might be developed as new therapeutics for pain and other ailments.
4. What’s one surprising thing you’ve learned while producing the first four weeks of modules?
NBC Learn is the education arm of NBC News, which means we’re all news reporters and producers — committed to telling stories of relevance and significance, and doing so in visual character-driven narratives in which we let the characters speak for themselves as much as possible. That’s surprisingly challenging when your “characters” are denaturing proteins or chiral molecules. Also, that there are at least six different pronunciations of “the Maillard reaction.”
5. At the end of the International Chemistry Year will you be so enamored with Chemistry that you quit your day job and sign up as a lab assistant at the nearest chem lab working on chocolate?
Actually, my personal goal is to be able to sing Tom Lehrer’s “Periodic Table” song straight through without going blank after “iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium”…
