Last night I watched a rerun of a Late Show with David Letterman, where he had kid scientists who performed 3 scientific demonstrations. Lee Marek, a science teacher from Naperville Illinois trains local students to do the demos on the show. I try to record them each year and show the demos to […]
Archive for December, 2006
Video: Kid Scientists on David Letterman
Published by December 30th, 2006 in Demos and Video. 2 CommentsI wanted to do something fun in my class for the holidays, so I decided to look for some chemistry Christmas songs that my students could sing. I found a great site with several songs. Some titles include The Chemistry Teacher’s Coming to Town, I’m Dreaming of a White Precipitate, Silent Labs, Deck […]
The winter holidays are here, and it’s time for a related science demo! If you teach about the chemistry of polymers, instant snow is a fun demo to do around the holidays. Instant snow is a superabsorbant polymer. A polymer is a complex molecules made of smaller molecules. Poly means many […]
I got this via Digg, a Google Video that shows various planets and stars to scale. Very simple and straight forward. Very impressive!
Activation energy is the minimum amount of energy needed to start a chemical reaction. Many chemical reactions don’t need a lot of energy to react. A classic example when baking soda mixes with vinegar. The heat energy that is in the environment is enough to start this chemical reaction. Other chemical reactions […]
The alkali metals are highly reactive since they have one valence electron. One of those metals is sodium. It needs to give up one electron to become stable. When a cubic centimeter sized piece of sodium is placed into water, a vigorous chemical reaction occurs in which sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and hydrogen […]
