Chemistry You Can Use, Friday, Period 1

[tyler_gone]

After waiting for the last students to arrive, Tyler shut the classroom door and briskly handed out copies of the syllabus. "Good morning, glad to see you all came back," he said. "First, that's your syllabus for the semester and the class rules. Don't get too attached to the syllabus part -- I might get bored and change it. But you might wanna start thinking about your midterm. It's about six weeks off, and you're going to be designing and executing your own experiment for it. We'll talk more when that's closer."

He indicated the paper mache volcanoes set on a lab table. "Right, yesterday Ino and Rikku, your TAs, gave me a hand and built those model volcanoes. Today we're going to make them explode."

"What you're going to do is put a good palmful of baking soda into the water bottle inside the volcano, then slowly pour in about a cup of vinegar. You can tint the vinegar with food coloring if you want it to look more like real lava. This is a basic acid-base reaction -- the acid of the vinegar and the base of the baking soda react and release carbon dioxide. The result is ... well, you'll find out. But first, let me explain what an acid is and what a base is." He did so, presenting a brief and handwavy lecture.

"We only have six volcanoes, so you guys get to work in pairs. Let me know if you have questions."

Comments

Re: Science! [9/12]

[wantstodirect]

"Wait, we should add some food coloring," Tony said. "What color is our volcano?"

Re: Science! [9/12]

[neurotic-witch.livejournal.com]

"Um, let's do green," Chris suggested.

Re: Science! [9/12]

[wantstodirect]

Tony added yellow and blue food coloring to the volcano. "Okay, go!" he said.

Re: Science! [9/12]

[neurotic-witch.livejournal.com]

Chris poured in the vinegar carefully, not wanting to overdo it.

Re: Science! [9/12]

[wantstodirect]

Tony took a step back, not sure how much of an explosion to expect.