Reflections of a chemical dad

We now tested what happens when you mix acids and bases. What I really like about this video is that you can see that some of the concepts have been sinking in. In particular Matthew has learnt how to use the colour chart and is testing his own ideas like what happens if we add more.

The first time we tried to make this video I did not have the colour standards in the backgroud. Matthew really didn't get the concept. After discussion with a more experienced science educator (my wife) I change the way we ran the experiment and used the colour standards. They definately helped get the point across. Testing soda water really was a spur of the moment idea and definately got us thinking about where it fitted into our colour scale - make sure you watch to the end to see this. If you would like to see our first attempt - here it is. Sorry about the lower quality. It is really interesting to see how much more Matthew was able to understand through using the colour standards. In our first take when I asked him why things were happening he kept coming back to “they are made of chemicals”.

We started a series of video looking at acids and bases. Fittingly we used purple cabbage as our pH indicator. What I love about the first video is that Matthew eats the cabbage during it - this really highlights the important point that everything is made up of chemicals (currently a very 'dirty' word).