#chemclout: a social media challenge for communicating chemical concepts to broad online audiences (2020-present)

The way that students communicate and engage with one another and their communities is rapidly evolving. In this modern era, many undergraduate students are already quite advanced in content creation and dissemination, learned through years of navigating the intricate webs of social media.

As an extra credit assignment in Tim’s general chemistry course (CHEM 001B) at UC Riverside, students participate in a social media challenge called #chemclout, where they harness their social media savvy and brilliance to produce chemistry-themed Tiktok videos. In creating these videos, students actively engage with their coursework by packaging core chemical concepts into a digestible format for broad communities. Many UCR students come from diverse backgrounds and hometowns where science is not seen as a topic of interest or a viable career path. The hope is that these videos will make science more accessible to the members of their community back home, and highlight chemistry as being both fun and relatable. These videos also resonate with the demographic of students that use Tiktok around the world who are learning about the same chemical concepts in their coursework. These students, who are already consuming Tiktok videos on a daily basis, may benefit from such visual demonstrations and reimaginations of core chemical concepts.

The videos that the undergraduate students made in the first year of this program were incredibly clever and creative –– by tracking the #UCRChem1BW20 hashtag, we found that the #chemclout videos received over a million views worldwide within the first month.

Based on the course material, video themes generally included phases of matter, redox reactions, gas laws, solutions, and entropy. 59% of the class (165 out of 278 students) participated in this activity. At the end of the course, students in the General Chemistry course used an in-class polling system to vote on the winners.

This concept has since been extended to showcasing careers in STEM by UCR undergraduates as well as the academic research experience. This work has also been featured in Massive Science. More details can be found here, where the syllabus for the activity is provided.

Links to TikTok Videos:

CHEM 001B Winter 2022 (All videos)
CHEM 001B Winter 2021 (All videos)
CHEM 001B Winter 2020 (All videos)

#LifeInChem - by Tim Siu (All videos)
NASC 093 Fall 2020 - Careers in STEM (All videos)