This is a great set of labs that will reveal to students the chemistry behind making pigments and provides a unique balance between chemistry and art concepts.  Chemistry concepts include data analysis, chemical reactions, limiting and excess reagents, and percent yield.  Art skills utilized include combining pigments with a binder to create watercolor paints and utilizing watercolor painting techniques to create a piece of artwork.

Students use two double replacement reactions in sealed test tubes to investigate whether mass changes during a reaction.

How do we get potable water from Lake Michigan? In this project we explore water filtration through a guest speaker from the water utility and two subsequent labs on water filtration and water testing to build career connectedness in the classroom.

A quantum spin on an old chemisty favorite, the flame test.  Here, students will explore how electrons act as messengers.  Using ground and excited states of electrons the idea of superposition can be examined and explored.  

This lab exercise exposes students to a potentially new alternative energy source hydrogen gas. Student teams are given a hydrogen generator and an oxygen generator. They balance the chemical equation for the combustion of hydrogen gas in the presence of oxygen. Then they analyze what the equation really means. Two hypotheses are given, based on what one might predict upon analyzing the chemical equation. Once students have thought about the process, they are walked through the experiment and shown how to collect the gas in different ratios. By trial and error, students determine the ideal combustion ratio. For both volume of explosion and kick generated by explosion, they qualitatively record results on a 0-4 scale. Then, students evaluate their collected results to see if the hypotheses were correct and how their results match the theoretical equation. Students learn that while hydrogen will most commonly be used for fuel cells (no combustion situation), it has been used in rocket engines (for which a tremendous combustion occurs).

Ductile iron, also called spheroidal graphite iron, is a type of graphite-rich cast iron. Due to the nodular graphite inclusions, ductile iron has a larger impact and is stress resistance, thus it is used for automobile parts.

Students will solve percent composition problems after learning about the process of making ductile iron at Waupaca Foundry.

In the presence of water, citric acid and sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) react to form sodium citrate, water, and carbon dioxide. Students investigate this endothermic reaction. They test a stoichiometric version of the reaction followed by testing various perturbations on the stoichiometric version in which each reactant (citric acid, sodium bicarbonate and water) is strategically doubled or halved to create a matrix of the effect on the reaction. By analyzing the test matrix data, they determine the optimum quantities to use in their own production companies to minimize material cost and maximize carbon dioxide production. They use their test data to "scale-up" the system from a quart-sized ziplock bag to a reaction tank equal to the volume of their classroom. They collect data on reaction temperature and carbon dioxide production. More advanced students are challenged to theoretically predict the results using stoichiometry.

This lesson is designed to help students connect learning about chemical reactions to future careers. Students will look at a career of interest and link it to a specific chemical reaction.