Chemistry ACS Student Affiliates

By Lucy Wood

Hooking Kids on Chemistry

Every year at the ACS spring national meeting, Student Affiliates members help with innovative programs whose goal is to show kids that chemistry is cool.

“Duck sauce seemed to work,” says senior education associate Patti Galvan, as she describes the kind of condiment packages required for the Cartesian diver experiments conducted for school-age children last year at the ACS national meeting in Atlanta. The experiment called for putting the packages in either a one- or two-liter bottle of water and then squeezing the bottle. When you squeeze, the packets sink. “The water has nowhere to go,” Galvan says, “so it is pushing against the packet, which has less volume but the same mass, and that increases its density.”

Ketchup packets don’t work very well, she explains. Neither does soy sauce. They both tend to be too dense, she says.

These are the kinds of things Galvan must take into consideration as she organizes the Chemistry in Action program for this year’s ACS spring national meeting being held March 25–29 in Chicago. This year’s theme—It’s Easy Being Green—is tied to Earth Day on March 20.

Typically, the theme is linked with the ACS’s National Chemistry Week, and for last year’s spring convention in Atlanta the theme was the Joy of Toys. The event, held at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta’s DeKalb County public school system, attracted hundreds more visitors than anyone expected. “I hoped there wouldn’t be so few that it would be embarrassing,” says Ed Finkel, a physicist who at the time was also a spokesman for Fernbank. Instead, he says, “it was an embarrassment of riches.”

Well over 1000 people filed through the event, he says, and to deal with the unexpected crowd, the science center temporarily diverted many attendees to its planetarium, where they viewed one of the center’s shows and stayed cool. The planetarium holds 500 people, Finkel says, and even then, the exhibit floor was still full.

The wildly popular Chemistry in Action program consists of 6–10 scientific experiments aimed at introducing scientific principles to elementary-school children. It takes place every year with the help of volunteers from the ranks of ACS Student Affiliates chapters around the nation.

“It’s good to get involved in science at a younger age, whether it’s chemistry or another kind of science,” says Lee Jackson (ACS ’96), a former Student Affiliates president, “because a lot of them have wrong impressions of the sciences. The more they are exposed to it, the more they will be inclined to study science and become science majors.”

Jackson, 33, graduated from Savannah State University last year. He was a member of the university’s Student Affiliates during his four years of college, and he was the group’s president his junior and senior years. He likes chemistry, he says, because chemistry is a fundamental part of all the sciences, and more than any other field of study, “you learn from the foundation up about how things work. You’re dealing with atoms and molecules,” he notes.

Jackson came to chemistry somewhat late in life. After finishing high school in 1992, he went into the military. “I graduated . . . on Friday,” he says, “and Wednesday I was in boot camp.”

Jackson was a Navy corpsman for eight years before he decided to go back to school. “I grew up in a small town, and it was mostly a farming community,” he says. “I wasn’t exposed to what chemists are or what they do, and I think if I’d had that exposure I may have decided to become a chemist earlier.”

That’s one of the reasons why he’s an advocate of the outreach programs that the ACS provides for young children, including the Chemistry in Action event at the spring national meeting. Another was the simple gratification of lending a helping hand. “I enjoyed working with the kids,” he says, “and seeing their curiosity and wanting to understand how things work.”

One such kid was Seth Carter, 9. The third-grader from the Atlanta area vividly remembers many of the experiments from last year, and he says, “It was all pretty cool.” Some, in fact, were “really cool,” and he wants to go back.

Carter is a science enthusiast who someday wants to design rockets for NASA. “I’ve liked science from a long time ago,” he says. “When I was little, I didn’t know what in the world science was. Now I know that if we use science, we can figure out a whole bunch of things.”

Carter’s father, R. Michael Carter, is also a big fan of last year’s event and says that if the schedule works out, he would like to take his son to the Chemistry in Action event again this year in Chicago. “When science has pertinence,” the elder Carter says, “there’s a special motivation to learn.” And that’s why he was so impressed with last year’s activities at the Fernbank Science Center. “The most extraordinary feature,” he says, “was the opportunity for the children . . . to see applications of the science they are learning in school.”

This year’s event takes place March 24 at the Notebaert Nature Museum on Chicago’s near North Side. The museum has an extensive outreach program with area schools and youth groups, and the ACS event will be tied in with its annual Science Exploration Day.

The experiments this year revolve around various aspects of sustainability and green chemistry—recycling, water treatment, and industrial efforts to preserve the environment. In addition, there will be encore experiments from last year, such as Shrinky Dinks.

Shrinky Dinks are essentially baked deli lids made from plastic with a recycling code of six, though they can also be made from the clear plastic lids found on popular brands of yogurt,. “Most places don’t recycle number sixes,” Galvan says, “so you need to find something to do with them.” Bulk white packing styrofoam, which isn’t used to make Shrinky Dinks, is one of the few number six plastics that many communities do recycle.

For the Chemistry in Action event, youngsters use permanent markers to draw on them, and the decorated lids are placed in a toaster oven for two minutes. They tend to curl up and fall flat, and the end result is a smaller version of the original lid. The baked lids are then turned into key chains.

The experiments are aimed primarily at children in grades four through eight. The goal, Galvan says, is “to show people that science is a part of their everyday lives, and to show kids that chemists are people like you.”

Scientists are often depicted blowing something up, “and it’s typically a man with crazy hair,” Galvan says. At the Chemistry in Action event, they can see that chemists are men, they’re women, they’re young, they’re old, they come in all shapes and sizes, she says, and “they are normal.”

Lucy Hood is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer. She has written about education for the past 10 years, winning state, national, and international awards for her reporting.