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Success Stories
How One Professor Transformed Student Engagement in Chemistry with Aktiv and Top Hat
Professor Aaron Goodpaster replaced frustrating software with intuitive, mobile-ready tools to engage his students and ensure they could focus on learning chemistry.
Aaron Goodpaster
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Making chemistry education more relatable and appealing to students
For the past 14 years, Dr. Aaron Goodpaster has taught the full spectrum of chemistry courses at Ivy Tech Community College, where he serves as Associate Professor of Chemistry and Department Chair of Life and Physical Sciences. He began teaching shortly after finishing graduate school during the Great Recession—an unexpected career pivot that became a long-term passion. Over the years, Goodpaster has taught everything from introductory and general chemistry to organic, analytical and capstone research courses, working with students who range from first-generation college learners to dual-credit high school students. As a community college, Ivy Tech benefits from smaller class sizes and offers targeted academic support to smooth the transition from high school. Despite these advantages, it’s still a challenge to actively engage students in course material and support them as they learn complex concepts.
Goodpaster’s teaching philosophy emphasizes making chemistry relatable and accessible by connecting it to daily life to boost student engagement. His courses aim to prepare students for further study and practical application, especially for non-STEM majors and those entering healthcare fields. Goodpaster is personally committed to preparing students for upper-year General Chemistry courses—however, his previous learning platforms failed to provide essential support. For instance, drawing Lewis structures often led to frustrating software errors that marked correct answers wrong, and the platforms poorly supported fundamental skills like nomenclature and dimensional analysis. Instead of providing the necessary scaffolding and informative feedback, the overwhelming or unhelpful responses frustrated students—negatively impacting their motivation and the overall classroom environment.
Taken together, these challenges made it clear that students needed a platform that was not only technically reliable and mobile-ready, but also purposefully designed around the ways students learn chemistry.
Leveraging Aktiv Chemistry and Top Hat to drive active learning and incentivize the learning process
After experimenting with nearly every major chemistry platform, Goodpaster discovered Aktiv Chemistry, which addressed many of the obstacles he’d encountered. Aktiv Chemistry offers an extensive library of over 30,000 problems and activities that support all topics in General Chemistry, Introductory Chemistry, Biochemistry, GOB and Organic Chemistry. Aktiv’s approach to drawing Lewis structures and organic molecules immediately stood out to Goodpaster and his students. “Aktiv revolutionized structure drawing. Other programs marked students wrong because they didn’t draw the structure precisely the way the tool wanted them to, but Aktiv is quite intuitive,” Goodpaster says.
Aktiv’s scaffolded question types for nomenclature and dimensional analysis provided just the right level of support, helping students build confidence without giving away answers. The platform emphasizes the importance of practice through interactive problem sets and activities that provide instant feedback, allowing students to reinforce their learning. Ultimately, Aktiv allowed Goodpaster’s students to focus on genuine learning instead of struggling with learning a new software program.
Around the same time, Goodpaster began using Top Hat, a decision propelled forward during the move to remote teaching in 2020. Top Hat’s ability to embed live questions directly into lecture slides transformed how he kept students engaged—particularly those who are enrolled in the online section of his course. “I frame my Top Hat questions as “life checks” for my virtual students. I can intersperse questions at the beginning and middle of lectures to make sure students are listening. Being able to customize participation and correctness scores has motivated students even further,” Goodpaster shares. Top Hat’s real-time insights also enable him to adjust lectures in the moment based on student understanding: “If students answer mostly right, we move on. If not, we spend more time unpacking specific concepts,” he says.
Perhaps most meaningfully, using Top Hat from his iPad strengthened his connection with students during in-person classes. One student told him, ‘I love that you use Top Hat on your iPad instead of writing on a whiteboard because this way, you never turn your back to us,’ a comment that reshaped how he approaches teaching and presence in the classroom.
Offering a more accessible and modern experience to chemical education
Goodpaster has taken his commitment to interactive and scaffolded learning to new heights by using Aktiv Chemistry and Top Hat in tandem. He uses both tools to provide immediate feedback, boost accountability and support students regardless of their device or comfort with nomenclature and manipulating chemical models.
Aktiv’s intuitive interface, mobile-first design, and scaffolded learning tools help students overcome early hurdles in general and organic chemistry. Top Hat enhances live instruction by keeping students active, attentive and engaged through embedded questions and real-time insight.
Goodpaster’s virtual organic chemistry exams, delivered through Aktiv, further reflect his trust in the platform’s structure. He particularly applauds Aktiv’s drawing-based questions, which require students to apply their understanding in the moment as opposed to memorizing answers to a multiple choice test. He praises Aktiv for its ease of use, calling it “one of the most intuitive software programs” he has worked with throughout his career. “I was able to create assignments in minutes. There was almost no learning curve.” Goodpaster wholeheartedly believes that Aktiv Chemistry and Top Hat together have created a learning environment that is accessible, interactive and truly reflective of how today’s students learn best.
About Aktiv Chemistry
Aktiv Chemistry provides detailed instructions and methods to help students solve specific chemistry problems. Students can access the Aktiv Chemistry app from any iPhone, iPad, or Android device, as well as online with any Mac, PC, or Chromebook. Aktiv Chemistry’s gradebook can be synced with nearly any LMS such as Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, or D2L. Additionally, Aktiv Chemistry offers additional security with both Question Pools and Algorithmic Problems that randomize the content delivered to each student during assignments.
About THE PROFESSOR
Aaron Goodpaster is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Department Chair of Life & Physical Sciences at Ivy Tech Community College in Muncie, Indiana. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Miami University in Ohio (2011). Through his work at Ivy Tech, Goodpaster teaches general, organic, and analytical chemistry courses and leads departmental efforts to deliver high-quality science education to a diverse student body. Goodpaster’s commitment extends beyond lecturing: as chair, he played a central role in upgrading the campus’s science labs—installing modern equipment such as fume hoods, chromatography instruments, and rotary evaporators—to ensure students have access to safe, professional-grade learning spaces.
Aaron Goodpaster
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