| Tell us about your company: |
| Creating fun and accessible chemistry stories has been a labor of love for Colleen as a retired University of Arizona chemistry professor and author of a series of kid’s chemistry comic books. In 2023, the PBS short documentary, “Comic Book Chemistry” was awarded an Emmy. This documentary centered around Colleen’s vision, chemistry comic book series and her success with teaching college-level chemistry concepts to kids. During Colleen’s 30 years of teaching chemistry, she became aware that her students were struggling with basic concepts, including fluency with the symbols for the elements themselves. These comic books, videos, and activities are Colleen’s gift to all future scientists – one that will help them succeed in college chemistry. |
| What inspired you to start your business? |
| After seeing inequities in science education throughout my 30-year teaching career, I decided to take a novel approach to solving this problem. I began writing comic books to help kids better understand the fundamentals of chemistry. About half of college students who start out majoring in the sciences don’t finish those degrees. A 2020 study in the peer-reviewed journal found that students from all backgrounds enter college intending to major in a science field at the same rate. But underrepresented minorities’ low performance relative to their capabilities in required college chemistry courses contributed to their especially high attrition rates in science majors. The age-old question for me continues to be…WHY are these students failing chemistry at such high rates? My research uncovered an answer to this question. Fundamentally, learning chemistry is like learning to read and students entering college are, for the most part, molecularly illiterate. If you consider the Periodic Table the alphabet of science, formulas are the words of science, and chemical equations are sentences, then you can see strategically how both reading and chemistry follow the same paradigm for learning. What I discovered is the best time to teach kids chemistry is right after they have learned to read (ages 8+) so that they can use the same neural pathways and strategies to become Molecularly Literate. Hence, I created this comic book series that scaffolds the learning objectives found in a 100-level college chemistry course to be used to teach chemistry to students ages 8+. This curriculum has been used for the past 3 years with elementary and middle school students with 95% of the students mastering college chemistry concepts and NGSS standards. I now feel an urgency to increase Molecular Literacy on a global scale. |
| What are your proudest achievements so far? |
| The scope of products that I have produced – comic books, videos, audio books – all with no formal training in any of these areas. I’ve had to adjust from a chemistry research professor to a children’s media guru. This late career pivot required courage, humility, and persistence. |
| What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs: |
| Try everything. |
| Please share a memory or thought about your alma mater: |
| During the spring of my freshman year of college, I sat outside of a chemistry professor’s door for 4 hours (this was prior to email, cell phones, etc.) waiting for her so that I could ask her if I could join her research group. She said yes. This changed my life. I became a chemist and a chemistry professor! |
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