My perspective of the day (Which was totally awesome!!!)
On April 19, my sister and i went to the UBCO campus with our co-op group.
First we went to the chemistry lab, and made elephant tooth paste. Then we popped balloons with gases in them like carbon dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen, ect. I held a broom with the hydrogen filled balloon on the end. My friend Morgan held a meter stick with a match on the end. The balloon popped and hit me in my face, it was really scary because when it popped it popped out flames. I was okay though.
After chemistry we went to the biology lab. There we learned about flat worms( planaria ).
We got to conduct our own experiments on the flat worms (no planaria where harmed in the experiments). In one of the experiments we did a control experiment ( control experiment is so you can compare what they do normally to what you changed ) then we put a peace of cow liver in the center of the dish.i found that it takes longer than 5 minuets for them to notice it. We also did an experiment where we covered half of the dish with aluminium foil so half was dark, then we put a lamp over it. I found that the flat worms went strait for the darkness.
Then we had lunch and cupcakes. (yum!!)
After that we got a tour of the campus.
Then we got to look at an electron scanning microscope. We saw a lady bug eye, a beetle foot and a bruised apple. The bruised apple had millions of bacteria living on it. We learned that there is to arms on bacteria that helps them move around in water. I also learned that a regular microscope has the resolution up to 100nm. A electron scanning microscope has a resolution 0.1nm.
At the end we made ice cream out of liquid nitrogen. We learned that it is safer to not where gloves when handling liquid nitrogen. we also got touch it! we where not aloud to cup our hand because it pools and then starts burning your skin, but if you have the palm down and it spits it wont hurt.
After we eat the ice cream we poured the rest on the floor, and it made little liquid nitrogen orbs that if you touch them they split and dissolved.
I had a super fun time at UBCO.
Here is exactly what we did.
Chemistry Session approximately 1 hour
-overview of lab safety: glasses, fume hood, fire blanket, eye wash station, shower, close-toe shoes, long pants
-hypothesized about reactions of various gases (contained in balloons) to heat and oxygen
-discussed observations using knowledge of chemical make-up of the gases
-observed and participated in making of cold and hot packs by first keeping 2 chemicals separate and then combining them with a shaking motion as we do with store-bought packs (shaking breaks the barrier between the 2 chemicals, allowing them to combine and react, resulting in endo- or exo-thermic reactions
-elephant toothpaste demonstration: chemical reaction of a catalyst and hydrogen peroxide, resulting in an exothermic reaction
-slime: polymers (long chains of molecules) with ammonia added, resulting in a chemical reaction/connection
Biology Session approx. 1 hour
Focus: how to design an experiment using flatworms, including hypothesis, establishing a control, identifying variables (light, protein/food), recording observations, discussing results and considering the variables which may have affected their results
-brief discussion on possible uses of the study of simple invertebrates (genetics? cloning?)
Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream
-learned of the unit Kelvin for absolute temperatures
-The secret to the creamy ice cream is all in the rapid freezing of the mixture. The liquid nitrogen causes the fat and the water particles to stay very small, giving the ice cream its creamy consistency.
Tour of Campus: what they viewed
-students studying for finals all over campus
-gymnasium (set up with desks and partitions for final exams)
-greenhouse
-lecture hall: students sat in seats; brief demonstration of how screens are used by professors to enlarge data; learned how students use a device to register attendance, answers to questions by teachers which get sent to each individual student's file
SEM (electron microscope)
-students were shown various items magnified to at least 1000x the university's usual microscopes
-learned some of the applications of being able to magnify to such a degree (eg. by engineering students)
this is the biology lab where we learned about flat worms.
Making slime in the chemistry lab
In the chemistry lab, making a chemical reaction making the vile freeze to the wood plank
In this picture and the next picture, my friends are conducting an experiment to see how the flat worms react to light an dark
This is us in the lecture hall.
This is when we made ice cream out of liquid nitrogen.
after we dumped the rest of the liquid nitrogen on the floor. It made little orbs that evaporated when you touched it.
