Brain Breaks are powerful tools in education, supported by research showing improved focus, retention, community building, and reduced stress among students. When structured using chemistry principles, like in the Water Maze Race, brain breaks can also introduce or reinforce fundamental chemistry concepts.
Some metals and metal alloys undergo a transition to brittleness at cold temperature. This phenomenon likely contributed to the demise of the Titanic.
Why does the "Whoosh Bottle" experiment behave differently at different temperatures?
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.
Learn how to give pennies a beautiful, silvery-colored plating.
Learn how to form a blue-green copper compound on a penny, and then use that compound to make green flames. This is a great summer time activity for your next campfire!
Doug Ragan been using magnets of elements and subatomic particles for some time to help his students visualize what is happening at the particle level of chemistry. Download the files attached to the post and print out your own set of elements and particles!
Like most concepts in chemistry, intermolecular forces takes a bit of imagination and critical thinking to fully comprehend and apply when explaining a variety of situations. Though demonstrating the presence of these forces in a simple and explicit manner can easily be done, I wanted to change how I introduced IMFs a bit this year by focusing on a more data-to-concepts approach.
The solution to Chemical Mystery #15: The Leaky Cup is shown here.
How many of you could recite, word for word, a definition you learned in school? When you first memorized the definition, you could state “inertia is a property of matter”, or “density is mass over volume.” However, you struggled to apply it to a new situation and maybe you were unsure of how to construct a model of what it meant.
