This is another demo that I hope to enact some day soon! (I'll have to work on polishing up the ol' British accent though!) If you don't want the preamble of this Professor's retirement party, start the video at 0:49 and sit back and enjoy the wonders of acid-base chemistry!!
This is an example of taking concepts that are dense and seemingly irrelevant to 15-year olds and making them a source of curiosity and wonder. I would want to follow up this demonstration with a class discussion about what happened and why. I think a lot of times demonstrations stop at the curiosity stage, but don't let students in on the secrets of science. This can lead to students saying, "Yeah, it was cool, but so what?" which might lead to student disengagement in the long run, even if you continue to dazzle them with magical demos such as this one.
Laura, I wish I could have had you as a science teacher if this video is an example of some of the ways you would engage with your students and teach them new material. That was really cool! I agree that using demos like this can really help break down dense and hard to grasp concepts. I hope to use demos or fun activities in my history classroom in a similar way to engage students and instill a sense of curiosity and love of learning within them. Like you said I think it is important to follow the cool demo up with a good discussion filled with questions that move your students from low-order to higher-order thinking. Thanks for sharing this video and your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteWhat a delightful video Laura! This is not a demonstration I had experienced, so I will add it to my mental repertoire of possibilities. It's ever so lovely, and I love the Harry Potter story that goes along with it. I completely agree with you - it needs to be followed up with why! So much of chemistry is fantastic to experience, but challenging to truly understand, and I think that's one of the obstacles we will wrestle with as we develop our practice as chemistry teachers.
ReplyDeleteOne practical concern I would have is the work involved in setting up this demo and the amount of reagent used up. All the solutions are different concentrations that have to be fairly precise to get the colors right. After the demonstration, nothing is reusable because it's all been mixed together. So if you wanted to run this with 5 hours of chemistry (as I would have to), it would take a LOT of solution! It's probably doable, but it would be a heck of a day. Especially during my last three hours, which I have back to back, it would be challenging to reset in between classes unless you had doubles of everything. I've learned that thinking extensively about the reality before implementation is very important!