Salters’ Chemistry Festival
On Monday 27th April, I was lucky enough to get the chance to take part in the Salters’ Chemistry Festival, at University of Birmingham. Together with three other Year 7 girls, Alice Handy, Grace Owen, Serena Coccioli, I walked across, fighting the rain, to the University buildings. Mrs Bhagi, who had organised the trip, also accompanied us.
The Salters’ Chemistry Festival provides the opportunity for students to spend an entire day within a university department. To top it all we got to take part in all sorts of fun practical chemistry challenges. There were prizes for the best teams being awarded at the end of the day. We also got to see Chemistry “magic shows”, involving lots of interesting demonstrations.
At first, I must admit that we were all feeling extremely apprehensive, though we felt equally excited. Students were competing against each other from lots of different high schools, with some pupils being older and therefore more experienced then us!
Our first challenge, which took two hours, was a forensic investigation. In the imaginary plot a murder had taken place. Salt was found on the victim’s shirt, and a different salt was found in the room the victim was found in. Five different suspect’s jobs all involved using some sort of salt. Our task was to find out who the murderer was, by trying to match each suspect’s salt with the labeled salts that we had been given, to identify who the murderer was. We used the methods of filtration, evaporation and test tube reactions. The chief suspects were found by indentifying each salt, seeing if some were the same as the named salts, and checking to see if they had the same results as the victims.
After our well-deserved lunch break, it was time for the University challenge, the best part of the day. In this challenge, our assignment was to identify different liquid substances, since there had been a flood in the laboratory, wiping off the labels. The instruction booklet informed us what the substances were, but not which ones they were. Our immediate reaction was to mix the substances together, to see if they made different colours. When all hope seemed to be lost, and the mixtures all resulted in colourless solutions, we made a purple colour! This meant that one substance we used was an indicator, and the other was an alkaline. From these results, our team managed to identify all the other solutions!
To our relief, everyone competing got to see all sorts of incredible and interesting experimental demonstrations, ranging from exploding foam to “crushable” rubber (it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen)!
Then came the moment we had all been waiting for… prize-giving for our experiments! Many thoughts rushed through my mind… the recurring one was whether we’d win or not! Every group was given a prize for effort and dedication. Our group won a prize for the second challenge! Our hard work and commitment had definitely paid off!! We were also commended for the presentation of our results!
I think that the Salter’s Chemistry Festival was a fantastic way to learn more about Chemistry in a fun way. I hope that the Salter’s Chemistry Festival will carry on in future, so students will be able to get a taste of this exciting experience as well.
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