Pharaoh's serpent is the name of a very interesting chemical reaction that produces a snake-like foam. Unfortunately, it requires the use of a toxic mercury compound. Explore this very similar reaction that can be achieved quite simply by using fuel tablets and calcium gluconate tablets and learn a lot about the chemistry that is involved!
Josh Kenney shares three simple and inexpensive demonstrations using Elmer’s glue.
This lab guides students through taking data and constructing their own heating curve for water. It requires no special equipment, is low prep, is safe, and can even be done at home for homeschool or distance learning. Even though the lab activity itself is relatively simple and straightforward, the concepts still engage students in higher level thinking and gives them important practice with laboratory techniques and forming hypotheses.
Learn a bit about the chemical reactions that occur during a lightning strike, and how you can demonstrate these reactions in your classroom.
Flash rocks, typically pieces of quartz that produce light when struck together, are an example of the complex phenomenon of triboluminescence. The green chemistry aspects for the flash rock demonstration are considered, and LEGO models illustrating quartz crystals, piezoelectric materials, and nonpiezoelectric materials are presented.
The "Two-Faced" thionin reaction involves causing a purple solution to fade to colorless by shining light on the solution. I wondered if it could be demonstrated the color of light that caused this transition.
Did you know that sand can be converted into a mixture of gases that spontaneously ignites in air? The procedures involved are relatively simple to perform, spectacular to observe, and relate to a rich assortment of chemical principles.
This post describes a simple way to generate blue, green, orange, and yellow copper complexes, and to use these complexes to introduce students to the effect of temperature on chemical equilibria. The protcol avoids the use of caustic agents, allowing the experiments to be conducted by students as a laboratory-based investigation.
Ben Meacham decided to alter his approach to teaching about enthalpy and focus on getting students to first develop the mathematical model for enthalpy of solution so they could eventually apply it to make predictions for different solutes being dissolved. In this blog post he shares the process he used with his class.
Learn how to thermochemically analyze the Devil's Milkshake chemical demonstration - just in time for Halloween!
