• Question: What is the best experiment you hade done in school

    Asked by anon-185142 to Rebecca, Martyna, Callum, Alice, Adam on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Callum McHugh

      Callum McHugh answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Hi Moomoo,

      Haha….I was at school a long time ago and so my memory is a little fuzzy when it comes to favourite experiments.

      We did lots of practical chemistry and physics at school and I always loved chemistry. I remember doing flame tests, titrations, looking at solubility and also some preparative chemistry.

      I guess my favourite might have been looking at the reactions of metals with water, I always enjoy the fizzing and watching the metal zoom around the surface of the water. I also enjoyed doing things like tests for oxygen and hydrogen…basically anything where there was a pretty interesting and visual result!

    • Photo: Martyna Pastok

      Martyna Pastok answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      I loved observing things under microscope, I took whatever I could to look at that from closer. I liked observing animals, their behaviour, like cats, birds… I was a bit of a dreamer observing things around – observation is also doing experiments. Then at school I loved chemistry for that, when there were changes of colours or things were boiling or steaming after mixing some chemicals together. I loved also observing ‘moving colours’ doing basic chromatography experiments.

    • Photo: Adam Berlie

      Adam Berlie answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      For my A-level project, I studied the Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briggs%E2%80%93Rauscher_reaction). It’s a reaction that moves between different oxidation states of iodine and then ends up in a smelly, blue, fuming mess. This was massive amounts of fun and as a young lad with little chemistry experience, it took me a while to get the reaction going. But once I did I was able to monitor how changing concentations effects the rate of colour oscillations.

    • Photo: Rebecca Roddan

      Rebecca Roddan answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      We did an experiment where we dissolved 1p coins in nitric acid and then worked out what percentage of copper was in the coin. Bizarrely, because copper is really valuable now and old 1p coins have a high percentage of it, some 1p coins are worth more than 1p.

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