National Chemistry Week 2009 Activities Night
Kitty Wagner, NCW Coordinator

Princeton’s Frick Lab was the scene of quite a party on Friday, October 23! Two hundred guests (children ages 5 and up with parents and friends) joined 68 volunteers (19 adults and 49 Princeton High School students) to celebrate Mole Day, Mendeleev, and National Chemistry Week with an evening of demonstrations and hands-on activities. To honor the 140th anniversary of Mendeleev’s periodic table, the theme was “Chemistry: It’s Elemental.”

Guests saw that different elements react in different ways, and that the periodic chart can help predict the ways elements will react. They watched as hydrogen and oxygen became water, sodium and chlorine became salt, sulfuric acid took water from sugar to leave carbon, and excited metal atoms emitted different colors of light. Then they went to the lab to explore properties of elements and the compounds they make. They played games to learn more about elements and how they affect our lives, and they had the opportunity to do 18 different activities. The activities included splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with a hand-cranked electrical generator, decomposing hydrogen peroxide to  produce oxygen, comparing the reactivity of metals, making a battery that ran a motor, using carbon polymers to make bouncy balls and shrinking art, testing for conductivity, comparing light from different light bulbs, learning about the effect the sizes of atoms can have on the properties of materials, and testing the effect of acid on elements and materials we use for building.

All of these activities were made possible by our