Salter’s Chemistry Festival

A one day Chemistry festival hosted by the Salters’ Institute and the Royal Society of Chemistry at University College London.

Four lucky Year 7 and 8 students had a go at being real chemists for the day in a university lab.

The day encouraged a love of science and independent problem solving and teamwork skills.
Teams from 25 schools across the South East were involved and they each underwent two challenges to determine who were the practical chemist champions.
The day ended with a dynamic Chemical Magical Demonstration by Professor Andres Sella who never fails to impress!

 

What our Pupils said:

Melissa Ward – “Today at the Salters Chemistry Festival  we started off with a talk and then we went into a real science lab and did three test tube experiments to try and find who the thief was. My favourite experiment was the white power experiment. We had six different white powders and we reacted different liquids with them and saw their chemical reactions such as colour change, fizzing and temperature change.”

Neha Reni – “This afternoon we did an experiment where we had to measure different liquids such as sodium thiosulfate and hydrochloric  acid. We measured them, as we had to use a trial and error method to see how we could make cloudy sulfur closest to a minute. We found the practical challenging in a good way because we had to estimate and carry out probability. We got as close as 58 seconds.”

Holly Gibson – “I enjoyed the first experiment where we had to find out who stole the chemistry  trophy, because it wasn’t just one experiment there were a variety of experiments, such as using white powders and seeing how they would react. We also had different liquids and put universal indicator in them and had to identify their pH so we could see whether samples matched. There was also a riddle which I really enjoyed.”

Samuel Allam – “We saw a number of different experiments about solids, liquids and gases. He poured dry ice into water and it showed how pressure was affected. He used two coke cans, one was diet coke and the other was normal coke, this experiment showed how artificial sweeteners had a different density to normal sugar because the artifical sweetner floated. At the end of the demonstration he made ice cream using cream, custard, sugar, raspberries and chocolate buttons using liquid nitrogen and we got to taste it.”