Organic chemistry is often considered by undergraduate students to be the most difficult branch of chemistry. Instructors and senior students collaborated to develop CheMakers, a board game to help students understand organic reaction mechanisms and implement mechanistic thinking. The game, played by 3 teams, was designed to invoke meaningful discussions among students. To win the game, the students need to work together as a team to prepare their strategies, solve organic chemistry problems, and reach their objectives as quickly as possible. Evaluation of the game shows that the students enjoyed CheMakers and found it to be engaging and fun to play.

The use of social media platforms to promote social interaction in a digital classroom is a common approach used by many educators. However, implementing such a platform is met with many challenges, the biggest being student shyness and reluctance in participating publicly. In this paper, we introduce the Supplementary Discourse (SD) model, inspired by the Supplementary Instruction (SI) model, where the goal is to promote student−student interactions in an online space. The SD model is also applied in an introductory organic chemistry course using Discord, a channel-based social media platform. By engaging students with tutors and discussion questions, we successfully catalyzed the formation of a student learning community, with the Discord server accumulating an average of 86 messages per week in a 13week period, with students commenting that they felt less intimidated to ask questions in the server.