Getting a Reaction : UCI Students Show High Schoolers Chemistry’s Fun Side
Chemistry, says a group of UC Irvine science students, has gotten a bad rap.
Heightened concern for health and the environment has made the general public equate chemicals with cancer and oil spills, they say.
So, like a team of political image makers, UCI students in the Chemistry Outreach Program have embarked on a mission to prove chemistry is friendly, useful and omnipresent in nature. Their campaign stops are local high school science labs, where many students get their first and often last exposure to the complicated science.
“As soon as most people hear ‘chemicals,’ they think, ‘Yuck, it’s got to be a bad thing,’ ” said UCI graduate student Linda Schechinger. “When they hear ‘all natural,’ they buy it because anything natural is good. Well, cyanide is natural. Just because something is a chemical doesn’t mean it’s bad. Most of our drugs, like vitamins, are made of chemicals.”
Kicking off the first presentation of the year at Orange High School on Tuesday, Schechinger and partners showed students that chemicals can be fun too. They showed the kids how to pierce balloons with teriyaki sticks, mix solutions to create nylon, and ignite chemically treated cotton balls, all to showcase the curious properties and functions of polymers, gigantic molecules composed of smaller molecules of the same substance.
Polymers “are all around us,” Schechinger told about 40 chemistry students giggling with anticipation. “Wood is a polymer, so is cotton and skin. Chemicals are not all bad stuff.”
As an opening act, the UCI students passed around birthday balloons for the entire class and asked them to insert a stick through this common polymer without breaking it. Concentration muffled laughter as the teen-agers tried to carefully wiggle the sharp object into the inflated balloon.
Popping sounds started bursting across the room, as only a few students managed to show the polymer’s ability to stretch and regroup, sealing around the stick.
Fascinated, Juan Dotson, 16, proudly showed off his blue balloon on a skewer.
“There is a lot that needs to be learned about chemistry,” Dotson said. “The answers are out there. We just need to explore to find them.”
Since the project began three years ago, the Outreach Program has reached more than 3,000 students at more than 40 Orange County high schools. Braced with a variety of demonstrations that seem to border on magic, the UCI scientists help break up the tedium of classroom memorization and provide students with the chance to see experiments some schools could not afford because of time and money constraints.
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Students watched dry ice blown through a rubber straw become a vapor as it shoots out, and fire jump from a cotton ball--so fascinated that they asked the UCI team to repeat some experiments again and again.
The teen-agers jumped at the chance to get in front of the class and be the next to pull slime out of jars or dissolve Styrofoam peanuts in acetone.
Science could be this fun every day if schools had the resources, Schechinger said. For example, the material they use to illustrate the explosive properties of polymers is expensive to buy and store. The UCI group has an annual budget of about $2,000 to purchase materials for more than 20 shows. Through the university, they also have ways to safely dispose of chemical wastes.
James S. Norwick, founder and faculty adviser for the program, said it is valuable because today’s youngsters do not have the same access to homemade science that he did growing up.
“It’s almost impossible for kids to get chemical sets that have a remote level of danger or excitement,” Norwick said, referring to stricter safety regulations that prevent children from purchasing or playing with hazardous materials.
“At least when I was growing up, you could go to the store and buy things in unsupervised fashion and discover chemistry,” he said. “Literally thousands of scientists have spawned out of that. These days, no company would touch it in the world. We try to bring back some excitement by having at least some flashy demonstrations.”
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Ben Van Der Putten, 15, a beginning chemistry student, said the demonstrations were more advanced than what he currently is studying and “more hands-on experimental work than book work.”
“It seems like chemistry is funner at the higher level,” he said.
High school teacher Patty McCollom said the traveling scientists leave her students pumped full of questions she can use as springboards to explain more complicated properties.
Still, not all of the students seemed to buy the notion that chemistry is mostly fun and games.
“These are only the exciting parts,” said a skeptical Cathy Phan, 15. “It’s not that I’m not fascinated by it. To me, chemistry is still math. It seems like that’s all we do, balancing equations and predicting solutions.”
