A nephew of mine was asking for ideas on a high school science project - I’m a chemist but have to say I was coming up empty for ideas to do at high school - we did talk about extracting something interesting from plants or seaweed and he seemed quite taken with the idea.
Has anyone ever done something like this for a High School project? Say the kids go out and about collecting the plants, then perform a simple extraction to get a dye, say, or an interesting chemical.
One that caught my eye on the web was extracting extracting iodine from seaweed. Seems straightforward and potentially interesting - any teachers have experience of this one? My nephew lives in Ireland on the coast, so the seaweed angle is a good one I think.
[I think I’ve seen threads on science project ideas before, but I thought with the somewhat narrow theme it would be OK to post a new one.]
Well…um…this guy I knew in college…when discovered gathering certain mushrooms from piles of cow shit, told a dubious farmer he was collecting samples for a botany project. I understand some very interesting chemicals were later extracted therefrom…but I wouldn’t suggest that for a high school project.
What kind of access to chemicals and glassware does he have? For a rather simple extraction, there’s the pH indicator from cabbage experiment though it’s somewhat well-known and done by many students.
At a more complex end there’s the extraction of eugenol from cloves, which is a very common first-year organic chemistry lab. He’d need access to steam distillation glassware, though.
Thks for the replies (both :)). I think he just has access to the real basics, like beakers and maybe some simple reagents and solvents. The cabbage experiment is an excellent suggestion - I’ll suggest that one.
I don’t really know how much creativity is needed in project choice and whether lifting something straight off the net is OK - my feeling is that it’s more about the execution at his stage so well-described experiments are fine.
Using paper towels or filter paper, and isopropyl alcohol, you could do a chromatography experiment, looking at different pigments etc… in the plants around the house, in leafy vegetables etc…