A Delicious Alternative to your Hydrate Lab
Many chemistry teachers use a hydrate lab in their classroom. Students have some type of hydrate, usually copper (II) sulfate pentahydrate because of its beautiful color change, and dehydrate it over a bunsen burner. It’s a great lab activity because it can assess so many different things: bunsen burner lighting and safety, percent composition, percent error, accuracy and precision and the concepts of lab procedures and safety.
During my first two years of teaching, I was teaching chemistry in a retired art classroom. I had no lab materials, no chemicals, and no lab. I didn’t have any gas lines, so bunsen burners were out of the question. The classroom only had three outlets, one for my computer, one INSIDE a closet, and one for my SmartBoard, so hot plates were out of the question. Without the proper equipment, there was no purpose to ordering the chemicals.
I decided to switch out chemicals for food – which I did and continue to do very often. It’s easier than dealing with ordering supplies, or worst of all try to plan a field trip to a functional lab. These days, I keep doing my food labs because they’re fun. It’s that simple. They’re fun labs and I want my students to have fun in chemistry class.
The Delicious Alternative
The food in this hydrate lab is bubble gum. I use some really cheap bubblegum with a high sugar content. I would originally unplug my SmartBoard so that my students could plug in some electric balances to collect data. Luckily this lab could be done in the 40 minute class periods I had, so long as my students had already learned about hydrates.
Assuming you already are familiar with the hydrate lab here is how the bubblegum version works. The bubble gum replaces the hydrate, and the wrapper replaces the crucible. The students chew the bubblegum until it gets to a constant flavor, much like a constant mass.
Now all of the skills the students do in my version of the lab are the same as the copper (II) sulfate pentahydrate version, with the exception of the bunsen burner specific things. The only real difference is that my students always have a very high percent error. The reason for this is because as they are removing sugar, they are actually adding saliva. Therefore the mass isn’t going down as much as it should. I make sure that this comes up in our post lab discussion so they can write up proper lab reports. You can get the lab that I use by clicking here.
You can read about some of my favorite green chemistry lab reports in this blog post. You can also read about the way my students write lab reports here. Those lab reports require some pretty decent reports, which I have a rubric for. Grab your free copy of my lab rubric here.
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