WHO MAKES Self-org-chem

SELF-ORG-CHEM IS AN  ACADEMIC TEAM LED BY MIGUEL E. ALONSO-AMELOT, PROFESSOR OF ORGANIC, BIOORGANIC AND ECOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY (Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) AND MSc. ADELA TARNAWIECKI, ARTIST AND GRAPHIC DESIGNER (MSc in Educational Materials Technology from Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA). We are presently based in Spain after decades of university teaching & research in Latin America.

Our mission: make Organic Chemistry more attractive and accessible to students and teachers by means of: 

1) intensive use of up-to-date high class educational resources with emphasis on slide-based courses,  interactive on-screen class activities, and image-loaded scripts to guide teachers through the slide lectures.

2) Formal treatment of topics. We DO NOT share the "chemistry for dummies", view. Organic chemistry is serious business although not necessarily dull.

University teachers have a lot of work in preparing their lectures, which adds a heavy burden to the many chores they face every day of the week, and weekends too. We know this from the bottom of our hearts after more than 40 years of experience.

We want to give todays lecturers a hand the way we would have liked to have during our professional careers.

WHO ARE WE

ADELA TARNAWIECKI is a long time artist specialized in painting, bronze sculpture, digital photography and poster design. Her work has been exhibited in Latin America, the US and Europe where she has earned recognition.

We live in an era of unprecedented high speed communication where images are quickly taking over the space formerly occupied by words, she says. Traditional Chalk & Blackboard Education is being swamped and put aside by the power of sophisticated imaging in multimedia, games, movies and widgets you can carry anywhere you go with your portables, itablets, and internet connected iphones.

This means trouble for educators at all levels. Students tend to yawn and chat in chalk & board class more often than ever before  because of the image driven world they are accustomed to out there.

Let's bring the computer aided image to the classroom and wake them up!

But let's be true about this: Pluto's & Dondald Duck style characters and too many pictorial effects students like so much to insert in their term presentations are just a lot of bad taste noise that blur the message.

Lectures are messages in concentrate form. For images to help convey these messages they must be carefully designed because images can easily take over the attention and block the purpose of the lecture.

This is where art steps in. And arts, as much as sciences, need long years of training, hard study, taste development and experience. This is my contribution to Prof Alonso's lecture presentations.  Microsoft PowerPoint Office and equivalents in combination with specialized software are extremely powerful tools for the artist. Mixing it with a highly pictorial science sucha s organic chemistry at the right concentration may be really explosive.

So by working together we are putting the art into chemistry and the chemistry into art.