SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

When I was younger I didn't like science experiments.  I used to pull the ol' watch a volcano erupt using vinegar and baking soda experiment every year.  I dreaded meeting the annual challenge of having to come up with something other than the anti-climactic food-colored fizz dripping down a brown paper mache volcano.  Plus, it became really soggy and ineffective after the first eruption.  The whole set-up was more and more awful every time it was executed, but those were the limits to my scientific creativity in the early years.

Fast forward to Spring Break 2010 where, as a member of the American Chemical Society, I have decided to perform science demonstrations with a group of other Chem/Pharmaceutical Science majors at a local middle school to get the kids interested in the sciences.  There were four of us that each had a different experiment or topic that correlated with the science course curriculum.  I did an experiment called Elephant Toothpaste that you can pull off with household chemicals.  The chemical reaction that takes place is the decomposition of Hydrogen Peroxide.  You know what Hydrogen Peroxide does when you pour it on a cut?  It's kinda like that, only bigger.  It fizzes, or rather, it's supposed to fizz.  The final product should look like a bigger version of toothpaste (stripes and all).  However, due to some oversight on my part I ended up with a slow drizzle of bubbles that gave me flashbacks of the dreaded volcano from the early years.

I'm sure you know this already, but 20+ thirteen year olds are really not the best audience to disappoint, but the mess I made seemed entertainment enough and I left the front of the classroom before they could throw tomatoes.  Little did they know the real mess came with the last experiment.  We were supposed to make ice cream.  FYI if you put ice and salt in a big ziploc bag then place a smaller ziploc bag in it that contains some milk, vanilla, sugar and cream, after 15-20 minutes of shaking you'll have homemade ice cream.  Lots of chemistry to discuss here, mainly freezing points and how to change them.  Sounds simple, right?  

What happened next was a clear-cut case of Murphy's Law.  First, we ran out of salt.  Second, some kids didn't get sugar.  Third, 13 year olds tend to shake a ziploc bag a little too vigorously (i.e. salt and ice everywhere).  And lastly, when I looked up from my task of dispensing what was supposed to be equal amounts of vanilla with a shaking hand, my colleague leading this experiment was nowhere to be found.  He was probably crying silently to himself in a closet somewhere, which is what I would have done.  In his absence there were teenagers everywhere grasping for ingredients, there was a wet floor worthy of a lawsuit but that was still not as wet as our armpits, and a teacher using what I'm guessing is not an inside voice trying to regain control his classroom.  We could have given Ringling Bros a run for their money.  Yeah, not the success we wanted it to be.

We had an agreement to do this two days in a row and the teacher miraculously allowed us to come back the second day after suggesting a little more structure.  You'll be happy to know I got a higher concentration of Hydrogen Peroxide to give a little more "oomph" to elephant toothpaste.  In addition, ice-cream boy pre-filled the ziploc bags for his experiment, so day 2 went much better than day 1.  To the teacher's credit, he was fully prepared to do battle on day 2.  I noticed an extra garbage, rolls of paper towels, and his own much more frequent intervention.  Make no mistake about it, science experiments are traumatizing at any age.