More Chemistry Fun

We’re continuing to enjoy The Spectrum Chemistry this year. With a full experiment every week, the students are getting a lot of hands-on learning!

In this experiment, the students created and observed chemical reactions that caused dramatic color changes:

 

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In this experiment, the girls were excited to create actual batteries that could light up an LED by layering copper sulfate pentahydrate and zinc sulfate heptahydrate in vials and making the proper connections with zinc and copper electrodes.

It took them several tries to get it right (they struggled with the layers mixing too much, then made a connection error with their wiring), so they were thrilled when it did finally work.

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This experiment very clearly showed single displacement reactions in practice.  Wires of Al, Fe, and Zn were submerged in solutions of CuCl2. In each case, the copper in the copper chloride was replaced by the metals from the wires, causing the copper to accumulate on the wires. Heat and gas bubbles were also produced in the reactions.

One of the students commented that she liked being able to see the reactions that they had been balancing on paper.