Sciencey dopers! Equip my lab!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hello, fellow scienticians.

As my last act as manager of my little science centre, I’m going to spend February building a lab for kids. The Lab Brats programs will let grade 5 and 6 students have really immersive, FUN science experience, before they hit high school and have to learn about lab safety and how to write up their results (yawn). They’ll wear tiny lab coats and do actual experiments, just for fun! How cool does this sound, right?

So, I’m writing shopping lists, mostly beakers and test tubes and lab coats. Looking through the suppliers catalogues, I spotted some of the stuff I thought was really cool when I got to university, and into a well-equipped lab for the first time. Things like those vortex mixers, ultrasonic baths, magnetic stirrers, pH probes… the real lab stuff kids seldom get to play with.

So: can you think of any more things like these? Really sciencey stuff, with a fun, obvious result? I’m planning to write the programs around the lab equipment, rather than the other way around. (Actually, I’m planning on having my replacement write the programs… my last day is March 7! Eee!) Nothing hot, though, please. Cost no object, as we have quite a lot of grant money to spend!

Thanks!

2

Every lab needs an oscilloscope!

3

A decent microscope can do so damn much it’s ridiculous. A stereo microscope is nice because ordinary things–bugs, flowers, your fingertip, etc.–look incredible underneath. If you have a regular ol’ upright and can get access to slides or section stuff yourself, there’s a lot you can do there too. You can get decent microscopes for cheap.

6th grade is old enough to do PCR (genotype yourself!) also… but that’s a large expense for a very limited payoff IMO. Thermal cycler + gel rig + polymerase mixture + primers = $$$

4

Microcentrifuge(s).

I second stereoscopes. They rule.

I’d get a pH probe. If you get hot plates, you might as well get hot plates with magnets inside to do the stirring.

Spectrophotometers are fun, I think.

How do you feel about dissections? I did a sheep’s eye in ~2nd grade, but nothing again until I was a junior in HS.

If you get good light microscopes, get some hemocytometers. Counting cells is fun and educational!

How about expanding? A good fish tank, maybe?

Keep them far away from the flammables cabinet.

Thermocycler is neat, but I suspect a gene sequencer (to genotype yourself, as stated above), would be a bit much. Especially with both of these, the recurring costs are large (polymerase can be pricey). If you think you can swing the recurring costs, go for a thermocycler. (If you think you’ll have DNA you want to amplify. Like from POOP!)

A big fridge with big signs that say, “NO FOOD OR DRINKS!” Filled with agar plates or something.

An incubator for growing up bacteria. A shaking incubator if you want to grow up bacteria in solution rather than on plates.

Do you have an autoclave? You’ll want one.

Vortex mixers are brilliant. Good call on that. I love those things.

Pippetters and tips (recurring cost, there) are also fun to play with. And them knowing how to use them will make future science teachers not cry!

Liquid Nitrogen. Just because. Possibly combined with bananas.

Okay, that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. No doubt there’s a lot more I’m not thinking of.

5

It’s not as much fun to do as it is to say.

“Spectrophotometry for me!”

6

The hell it is. It’s torture for first-year grad students. :frowning:

The nice thing is you don’t need to sequence–you can just test yourself for similar alleles as the CSIs do. Run out a few microsatellite PCRs, and be surprised at the magic of genetic diversity! It’s a great lab when it works.

Good call. I think they’re real expensive though.

A million times yes. Micropipetting makes the world go round.

7

Happy shopping.

8

Heh. It was torturous to teach non-majors and 3rd year undergrads how to use them, but it’s really not a bad idea for a lab like this, I think. It something that can be used to make a bunch of labs, but isn’t hard to understand the concept of.

Probably so, but for a science lab, an autoclave is just indispensable. And she did say the magic words, “cost [is] no object”. This would be more useful than a bunch of things she could spend the money on. (I suppose it does depend on the science under discussion, but for a general one, GO AUTOCLAVE!*)

Amen!

*Seriously, you go autoclave. I have made so much goddamn media in my life, and it stinks to high heaven and burns as it pours.

9

Why, a Jacob’s Ladder of course.

10

Damn my ISP which is filled with people who eat stupid food for breakfast! The edit function timed out on me because of their idiocy.

Anyway, two things. I just noticed the “no hot stuff” and “can learn about lab safety later” parts of the OP.

I still strongly recommend an autoclave, for the behind the scenes work. There are a lot of microbiology, DNA and other labs that are appropriate for 5th & 6th graders that will need sterile materials. Bear in mind that some of what you’ll be doing is prep, so spend money accordingly.

As for the other thing, please start drilling lab safety into them as soon as you (or your replacement) can. If I had a dime for every time I’ve said or heard someone say, “No food or drink in the lab!” I’d be a very happy camper. If I had a dime for every time I’ve enforced or heard someone enforcing the other rules, I’d be so happy my grin would rival Alaska in size. And I’d never have to say it again, because I wouldn’t be a TA. That, and it might add to the cool factor for that age group.

11

Thanks guys! Maybe a bit more detail will help narrow down what we’re doing.

The lab is for visitors to the science museum, so they’ll be in there for one hour, max. So anything with growing things, be they plants or bacteria, is kind of out. (Unless they take it back to school or whatever, but we hadn’t really planned on that.)

Dissection stuff is an option, maybe. Gross, but popular. I’d also thought of a digital microscope, maybe not so much olde-fashioned light scopes… :slight_smile:
Micropipettes with tips, yeah… cool… but what to do with them?

12

Good point… carry out small luminescent reactions maybe? Lights out, fill your eppendorfs with fluorophores and throw a rave? I mean learn some chemistry. I mean… :smiley:

Wikipedia has a nice article on glowstick chemistry. Carried out at small scale it would probably be disgustingly cheap and really awesome.

13

I’m chair of my corporation’s educational outreach program, so this is a subject I’ve given a good bit of thought to.
I would start with consumables - plastic transfer pipettes and/or glass pipettes with bulbs.
Plenty of safety glasses and gloves, of course. Lots of Nalgene bottles for stock solutions of various chemicals. Disposable benchtop covers make cleanup nice. Weighing boats, spatulas.

Less specialized equipment would be more widely useful. Lots of beakers, erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes and racks. If you’re going to use liquid N2, you’ll want a wide mouth shallow dewar. Graduated cylanders, good balances. Filters, funnels, and collection flasks. Some sort of vacuum apparatus (teflon diaphram pump) if there isn’t one in-house.

As for the specialized equipment - if you could get your hands on a rotavap, that would be a terrific and fun way to quickly demonstrate distillation. A fun demo is using one to strip the water and aromatics from coffee - you get a clear liquid that smells just like coffee, and the brown stays behind.
I’ll second the mention of magnetic stirrers - I believe Fisher even carries ones with fun pictures built into the tops. I did a demonstration one year on making plastic and glue from milk, and the magnetic stirrer was the high point for most of the kids. Go figure.
Also really fun to play around with - a decent sized UV lamp. One of our core demonstrations involves photochromic materials, so we use ones that are large enough to stick all sorts of things under. You can also explore the UV properties of things like laundry detergent etc.
Oh, and while you’re at it with the UV lamp, consider other supplies handy for thin layer chromatography - silica gel plates, spotting capillarys, and developing tanks. Sure, you can do it with paper, but this is more fun.

14

Get pH strips as well as the pH meter. Comparing the measurements from the multicolored strips with the old-fashioned blue/pink ones and with the pH meter is an interesting way to teach about “equivalent methods” and about gasp obtaining results without using electricity! (which many Chemistry graduates from schools with too much money never learn about)

15

A pressure cooker is the cheap alternative. It does exactly the same thing. Standard conditions are 121C (250F) at 15PSI for 15 minutes. This is once the solution reaches temp, so larger volumes take more time.

16

For that matter, titration with pH sensitive dyes can be interesting to run parallel with a pH meter, and dye strips - watching when something like phenolphthalein changes color is fun. And with the other methods to provide additional confirmation of what’s going on, I think it would qualify as educational, too.

17

Missed the edit window: If you go for this you’ll want to get a decent glass, or poly, autoburette, so the little monsters don’t have to actually handle the fluids to refill it. (And so that the supervision doesn’t have to do it for them.) The one problem I can see, then with such is that it is possible to turn an autoburette into a somewhat cumbersome squirt gun* - so, don’t let the little darlings have too much unsupervised time with them, and don’t use any concentrated solutions.

*Lab squids do odd things when they’re bored. Trust me on this.

18

You seem to emphasize chemistry stuff, but there are physical laboratories and electronic laboratories and other kinds of laboratories. The ubiquitous Erlenmayer flask as a symbol of science doesn’t seem that sciency to me.

Neodymium-iron-boron magnets, for example from K&G Magnetics, have intense enough fields to dimple the surface of water and to repel a bismuth weight on a string.

A vacuum pump can change the way all kinds of little contained experiments work. Note that if you want to get rid of the viscosity and thermal conductivity of air, you can just barely do it with typical lab mechanical pumps, and need a diffusion pump or turbomolecular pump that is backed by a mechanical pump to get solidly into the vacuum behavior regime.

A little oven that can get things hotter-than-red-hot is nifty because you can turn sand into glass and do similar center-of-the-earth transformations.

19

oh my god do NOT make those kids run gels. You’ll burn out a future generation of research assistant monkeys. If I had been forwarned about performing hundreds of western blots back to back I would have never made it through college.

20

I think a bell jar and mechanical pump are sufficient for almost any lab demonstration. A colleague of mine uses a simple setup for various demonstrations like expanding marshmallows, popping balloons, freezing a cup of water, etc. Measuring the weight of air may be possible too (put a balance scale inside the bell jar, put two airtight pressurized containers on it, one open and one closed.)

And at my last lab we had a bell jar that easily got down to 10[sup]-2[/sup] torr range with just the mechanical roughing pump. I don’t think viscocsty and thermal conductivity of air would be noticeable at this level. Though you’re still in the danger zone for coronal discharge so I wouldn’t use high voltages in there.

Also - another vote for some electronics equipment. Namely an oscilloscope, function generator and some basic electronics components.

Maybe some optics experiments too. Lenses, prisms, spectrometers, maybe even a solar telescope?