Chemistry Innovative Uses

The new Vernier Spectrometer allows students to do a wide variety of new lab investigations. To highlight some of its many capabilities, we walked down to the nearest grocery store and picked up a few products to test. We analyzed the visible light absorbance spectrum of various food colorings to see if we could identify…

Subjects: Chemistry

Reprinted with permission from the author Roger Delpech and the publication School Science Review. School Science Review (the ASE’s journal for science education 11 – 19), ASE, March 2006, 87 (320) Abstract This paper introduces the use of a gaseous CO2 sensor and data logging equipment, for a variety of purposes in the school laboratory,…

Subjects: Chemistry

In order to determine the mass of a copper atom, students in William Green’s AP Chemistry class at E.O. Smith High School, Storrs, CT, follow a procedure similar to the lab “Determining Avagadro’s Number” found in Advanced Chemistry with Vernier. His students use an electrolytic cell having copper wire for both the anode and the…

Subjects: Chemistry

Creating the absorption spectrum of an aqueous sample is easy and fast with the Vernier Spectrometer. The graph below represents the spectral analysis of the four common food dyes. (The color of the line represents the color of the dye.) Students are often surprised to see that yellow dye peaks in the blue wavelengths and…

Subjects: Chemistry

A cute bath product made by Crayola®, called Bathtub Tints, offered us an interesting opportunity to conduct a few simple chemistry activities. The ads that we have seen for this product describe it as effervescent water color tablets. The first three ingredients listed on the label of a container of Bathtub Tints are sodium carbonate,…

Subjects: Chemistry

Eric Koser and his 9th grade physical science students at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minnesota, had spent a lot of lab time doing experiments studying mass, volume, and density with overflow cans. When the discussion of the density of a person came up, Eric took on the challenge to measure it. Fortunately, one…

Subjects: Chemistry

Thermocouples are one of the most common types of temperature sensors. They are inexpensive, rugged, and quite versatile, as they can measure a wide range of temperatures from very low (-250°C) to very high (1700°C) values. Since they can be made from very fine wire, they also allow for very fast response times. In 1821…

Subjects: Chemistry

Here is a nice lab idea by James Gordon, Amber Boyce, and Thoren Maule (Central Methodist University, Fayette, MO) that was published in The Chemical Educator (2004, 9, 1-2). Their experiment uses our Gas Pressure Sensor to collect data using the DataMate program and a TI calculator, but it can be easily adapted for Logger…

Subjects: Chemistry

Not only does this exciting reaction change from green to blue to purple to red, in less than a minute, but then it repeats the four color sequence continuously for over an hour! This very famous reaction is known as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction, or simply the B-Z reaction. We thought it might be interesting to…

Subjects: Chemistry