An Interview with Kieran Lim
(“Int” refers to the interviewer, “Kieran” refers to Kieran Lim)
Int:	Kieran, I'm interested to begin with in you maybe talking about the subjects you teach in the whole field of chemical sciences and maybe what the purposes of those units are from a student learning outcome perspective.
Kieran:	When we look at the world around us, different substances have different properties, so for example wood is hard and solid, whereas most gases are transparent and yet sometimes related substances can have different properties. Most metals are solids, but we have mercury as an exception to that, which is a liquid. Most metals are silvery, but again there are exceptions, such as copper and gold, which are yellow-coloured. But the basis of these chemical properties is that all the substances are made of atoms which are joined together in molecules and it's the molecular basis of size that we feel is important in fields as diverse as forensic science, biology as well as my own discipline, chemistry. And hence, although I teach chemistry, it's really a body of knowledge that we feel is important for understanding these other disciplines which we also teach here at Deakin.
Int:	Now your particular technology tool development seems to be relating to trying to address a particular learning need in teaching quantum theory in a particular subject. Could you actually explain generally, what's the sort of learning need or challenge here that you're looking at addressing by using the spreadsheet as a learning tool.
Kieran:	Quantum theory is a concept that describes how matter will interact with light, how it can absorb or emit different colours of light. Traditionally it has been based very heavily in mathematics, through an equation which is named after Irwin Schroedinger. For most realistic systems, students would need to have completed at least three, or perhaps even four, years of a mathematics degree before they could solve the Schroedinger equation. In chemistry, we just want them to have a feel for the qualitative behaviour, that when we solve the Schroedinger equation, only certain special energy levels are allowed and it's the changes between those special energies that correspond to the energy of the light that is absorbed or emitted. So we want them to have a feel for what goes on, but not necessarily to have a full grasp of the underlying mathematics. Spreadsheets allows us an easy way into that where students can play with the spreadsheet, where I have already programmed the mathematics in there, so they can see what the results will be without necessarily unpacking all the equations that underlie it.
Int:	I take it, Kieran, that you used alternative approaches to try to teach this theory before you came across the idea of the spreadsheet being a possible solution. How did it come about that you just went 'Ah ha', I think the spreadsheet might be the tool that can actually solve this particular learning challenge.
Kieran:	Well, when I first started teaching these topics, we would consider very simple cases where it was possible to look at the maths underlying a particular solution for the Schroedinger equation and then to ask students to make a leap of faith that, because we could show a solution for one very specialized, unphysical, unrealistic case, that they should then believe that similar behaviour should underline real substances and real world behaviour. Some students could cope with that and others could not. I was involved in a discussion, an electronic discussion list, looking at different programs that were available to plot the shapes of functions or particular data. There was a raging argument in the discussion list and the point was made that Excel could do everything, but do everything badly, whereas the specialized programs could do things well. But because they were specialized, they would only work in one particular area of size that was not easily transferable to other areas of size and at that time I started playing with spreadsheets and realized that, yes, it could do a lot of things, that its potential was really unrealized and at that stage I started building simulations with spreadsheets, just to put into my lectures and the current examples that we would look at are a growth from that.
Int:	I'm interested, Kieran, in this idea of playing with the spreadsheet, and sort of evolving the tool or solution over a long period of time. Could you give us some insight into what it meant to actually play with the tool, and experiment and get student feedback to improve the approach.
Kieran:	Science is an area where students, scientists, play with the world around them and it could be as simple as trying to look at sauce in a bottle and trying to get the right consistency so that will flow out of the bottle or different grades of engine oil where we want to have some that are thicker for use in summer and ones that are thinner, so that in the cold temperatures of winter, the oil will give the same performance. So science has always been traditionally experimental, where we can experiment with things. When we look at mathematics, quite often we lose that experimentation. When we look at the equations, they are either right or they are wrong, a solution either exists or doesn't exist. When we go back to the Second World War to the Manhattan Project, a new science called Experimental Mathematics was invented at that stage, where the people working on the development of the atomic bomb, said, “Here we have a set of equations and they will predict certain behaviour.' Let's play with the numbers that feed into the equations and see what types of behaviour can come out and in that sense it was possible to have an experiment using mathematics because there were things that the user could change and see what the behaviour was. And the whole development of spreadsheets has been like that. In a business sense, where people can try, what if we change the price of a particular commodity and see what would happen with the profits, and the whole idea of a spreadsheet is that then you can play around with numbers and see what the underlying behaviour would be. And in the same sense I've used spreadsheets to have experiments using the computer or simulation where students can say well what would happen if I changed a particular feature, can I get a molecule that is known to absorb light as certain energy, what would happen if I changed that particular energy, would the molecule still absorb the light, what would its behaviour be. On the other hand, if we stuck to the traditional mathematics approach, we know that for a particular energy, we have a solution, but if we change the energy, the solution becomes a non-solution, the whole thing just disappears and we don't get any insight into why that is because we can't play with the maths. It either is, or it isn't, it is either right or it's wrong, whereas with a spreadsheet, we can try wrong things to see why they are wrong and to try to understand the underlying principles.
Int:	So you mentioned that you've incorporated the spreadsheets into your lecturing and presumably you give students the opportunity to independently play with your spreadsheets, whether it be in tutorials or working independently away from the classroom. Could you tell us a little bit about maybe the students' experiences of being involved in this play with the spreadsheets? How do they experience it, what sort of reactions have you got from them?
Kieran:	I have had some student evaluation of how I've used it, and the spreadsheets are used in different contexts. One spreadsheet is used in a student assignment, so they look at the behaviour of the results they get from the spreadsheet, make conclusions, fill in a pro-forma, worksheet and submit that, whereas other spreadsheets are used as a pre-lab exercise so that they know how different molecular properties will influence the absorption or emission of light. Go into the laboratory, do a real experiment and try to make conclusions from the experimental result about the molecular properties that would have caused that behaviour. Overall the students like the use of spreadsheets because they see it as a skill that they can bring to other parts of their professional life not necessarily just playing with spreadsheets, because they won't play with my spreadsheets once they leave chemistry, but the whole idea that I expect them to use Excel, to look at it, when they get a nice graph, to be able to copy that diagram and to paste it into a Word document for their report. Those are skills which they can take with them to their future careers so that they like that aspect of it.
Int:	And, Kieran, in an ideal world and if you had the opportunities and resources, where would you like to take the whole approach in terms of developing the spreadsheet beyond what it is now as a teaching and learning tool, both within the areas you teach and maybe other areas within the biological sciences and mathematics.
Kieran:	I would like to introduce the use of spreadsheets even before students come to university. At the moment the assessment at high school level assumes the use of graphics calculators, there's equity and access issues associated with the use of spreadsheets because not all students can afford to bring a laptop with them into an examination. On the other hand, employers specifically want a set of skills for their new graduates, graduate employees and interestingly in a report published two years ago by the Business Council of Australia, Excel was the only program that was mentioned by name. There were lots of generic types of software, like browsers, electronic mail, but none of those named a specific product. So I would like to see spreadsheets used more at school, because, of all the generic software which students are introduced to, the use of spreadsheets is the weakest, compared to use of things like word processing, or use of web browsers, electronic mail. And then at university, I would like to see spreadsheets used across the curriculum. At the moment, in statistics there are specialised statistics packages. Students who need only one unit of statistics, who might never go on to a career in statistics, still have to learn the specialised statistics package. Whereas, if they learned something like a spreadsheet, then although it can't handle the higher level work, it is a package which is readily available. Almost everyone has it at home, in local libraries, at university and in their future careers. That's a package which they can use in maths, in physics, in biology, in chemistry. So it's a much wider vision, it's not using a particular tool in a specific context, but to try to use it across the board.
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