Consumer Chemicals

1986 Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute

INTRODUCTION:

The experiments and demonstrations included in this collection were developed at the 1986 Woodrow Wilson Chemistry Institute held at Princeton University. The goal was to develop activities that used chemicals from consumer products and inexpensive and/or readily available equipment. Because of the familiar nature of the materials being used, these activities should help students see that chemistry plays an important role in their daily life. In addition, these activities will be useful to teachers 1) who cannot order more traditional materials because of legal and/or budgetary constraints, 2) who are teaching "out of their field" and feel more confident using materials with which they are familiar, or 3) who, stimulated by these ideas, will try to develop or adapt other activities for use with their students. Some of the activities presented here are original; others are adaptations of traditional activities. Every effort has been made to credit the work of others in cases where activities have been adapted, but it is sometimes difficult, after many years of using a particular activity, to remember just where the idea originated.

1986 Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute Participants

LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS:

Determination of the Thickness of Zinc on a Piece of Galvanized Metal

Distillation of Water from an Aqueous Solution Using a Disposable Apparatus

Candy Chromatography

A Comparison of the Solubilities of Carbon Dioxide in Water at Various Temperatures

Determination of the Molar Volume of Carbon Dioxide

A Penny's Worth of Hydrogen

Preparation and Properties of Oxygen

Determination of the Relative Viscosities of Liquids

It's Getting Colder (Freezing Point Depression)

Reactions Between Ions in Solution Using Consumer Materials

Physical Properties and Intermolecular Bonding in Solids

Effect of Composition on the Melting Point of an Alloy

Fire and Brimstone (Reactions of Sulfur)

Colloidal Sulfur

The Effect of Temperature on the Rate of Dissolving

The Effect of Temperature on the Rate of Reaction

Balloon Race (The Effect of Temperature on the Rate of Reaction)

Effect of Surface Area on the Rate of A Heterogeneous Reaction

The Effect of Concentration on the Rate of a Reaction

An Inexpensive Kinetics Experiment

The Effect of a Catalyst on the Rate of a Reaction

Catalysis Using Enzymes in Pineapple

Say pH with Flowers, Fruits and Vegetables

Acid-Base Titrations Without Burets

Activities of Metals

Establishing a Displacement Series Using Consumer Materials

Electrolysis of Water Without a Hoffman Apparatus

Making and Testing a Simple Galvanic Cell

Tracking Electrons

The Chemistry of Copper Plating

Production of Cuprammonium Rayon

Photochemical Reaction: Ammonium Oxalate and Iodine

Photochemical Bromination of Hydrocarbons

Ion Exachange

Complex Ions and the Spectrochemical Series

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

	This program was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant TEI-8550891.		This module was scanned and converted into HTML by Jan Hildenbrandt and Paul Burchard (with some initial work by Ronnie Rossman, a high school student).
Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the contributing organizations.

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