Chemical Education Today
Report
A Year in the Periodic Table by Alton J. Banks and Erica K. Jacobsen
What’s it like to make videos of reactions of all of the chemical elements? A lot of fun! And a lot of work! One of JCE Software’s most popular publications has been the “The Periodic Table Videodisc”, which was published in 1989 (1). The videodisc provided pictures of each element; showed its reactions with air, water, acids, and bases; and illustrated common items in which the element was used. The goal was to enhance teaching of descriptive chemistry by providing a visual database about the elements (2). Twenty years later, the contents of this ground breaking videodisc remain just as useful, but they now are found in Periodic Table Live!, a freely available resource online at the ChemEd Digital Library (3). Alton J. Banks collected samples of the elements and supervised shooting the videos in collaboration with John Moore and J. J. Lagowski. Banks shared his experiences with Erica K. Jacobsen of the JCE staff. How did the video project begin? When teaching general chemistry at Texas State University (then Southwest Texas State University), it dawned on me that when I talked in class about sodium or potassium reacting violently with water, I had a mental picture of what that looked like, because I had seen it happen. But not every one of my students had. There were also times when I would talk to students about how we use various elements. What, for example, do we use titanium for? Scandium? Cesium? I thought it would be really nice to have a visual library of pictures of what an element looks like, elements reacting with some fundamental materials, and …when I talked in class about sodium applications of elements. or potassium reacting violently with I mentioned this idea to water, I had a mental picture of what Joe Lagowski at the University of Texas at Austin that looked like.
(UT Austin) and he said that the same idea had come out of a meeting of Project SERAPHIM. Led by John Moore and Joe, SERAPHIM was collecting and distributing software and also developing new ways to teach the descriptive chemistry of the elements. They wanted to couple a videodisc, which provides random access to individual video clips, with a computer program that would enable students or teachers to explore the chemistry of the elements using a visual medium as well as numeric data. The wonderful thing about a videodisc was that it could play a video sequence and stop automatically at the end, the computer could be interfaced to it to help select the videos, and you could stop on a particular frame and show a still picture. I applied for a year’s sabbatical, with support from Project SERAPHIM, to work on the project at UT Austin. How did you get the element samples and items that showed applications? How did you get some of the rarer elements, or didn’t you? In some cases we could not get samples. On the videodisc, for some elements it simply says “No Video Available”. I begged and borrowed, and fortunately, didn’t steal anything, but whenever possible I borrowed things so we could take photos to show an element’s appearance or one of its applications. Samples often came from colleagues. For example, Tom Morgan (of UT Austin) loaned us a five-gram sample of scandium that one of his graduate students was going to use in his doctoral work. At the time scandium was $500 a gram. So I had a $2500 piece of scandium that he was gracious enough to let us put in a sealed bag and take a picture of it, although we couldn’t use it to show its reaction with water, etc. I borrowed a CD player from an electronics store and a helium–neon laser from an analytical chemist. The National Institute of Standards and Technology sent us pictures of the cesium atomic clock. We went to an airport and got airplane spark plugs because they contain some of the precious metals. Were you able to find applications for each element or did you find it difficult to do that? We didn’t find applications or samples for every element. Some of the lanthanides and actinides are fairly esoteric and in
The very first reaction we filmed was hydrogen reacting with air. We had the hydrogen trapped in a balloon. …I held a match in a pair of tongs and approached the balloon. … The hydrogen did exactly what you would think it would do when it reacts with air. It provided this huge explosion inside a very small laboratory.
1144
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 10 October 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
Chemical Education Today
some cases only a few atoms of those elements exist because they are radioactive and some have extremely short half lives. For most of the transition and representative elements we did indeed find applications. Take a look at sulfur. It’s used in fertilizers, insecticide dusting powders, and also as part of medicinal compounds. Titanium is used in making steel. Those kinds of things just pop right out at you (4). Other applications were far less obvious. There were also all kinds of wonderful things around us. Debbie Bittaker was working with Joe and she had some beautiful nickel jewelry. So some of her jewelry has been immortalized on the videodisc as one of the applications of nickel. Were any reactions particularly difficult to capture? Elemental lithium was difficult. The problem with reactive metals is that one needs to be able to control when the reaction starts. Lithium is stored in a fluid with which it does not react. The question is how do you get the fluid off the lithium and show what happens as lithium reacts with air and still make the reaction “real”. We did not want to fake anything or make anything other than what people would observe under similar circumstances. We resorted to taking a small air hose in the laboratory and blowing on the lithium to get it to react with the air. It was a matter of wiping off as much protective fluid as we could, but if you wipe it off too soon, the reaction is over before you can start videotaping. Another issue was the reaction of mercury with oxygen. The problem was that if you tried to get the mercury to react with oxygen to form the oxide, it got a very thin surface coat of the oxide on it and then it wouldn’t react anymore. In the end we didn’t get a picture of it because it’s not interesting. You’re sitting there looking at this metallic gray blob and it gets a very thin gray coat on it. The person that worked on the actual shooting of the video had done work in Hollywood, is that correct? Yes, Nick Cominos had directed films in Hollywood for many years and at the start of the project had just “retired” to become a lecturer in the radio/television/film department at UT Austin. John and Betty Moore had run into Nick in Wuhan, China. When they told him about the videodisc project, Nick thought it would be excellent experience for his students. In the budget, we estimated that Nick would spend about 500 hours
Tom Morgan (of UT Austin) loaned us a five-gram sample of scandium that one of his graduate students was going to use in his doctoral work. At the time scandium was $500 a gram.
...it dawned on me that when I talked in class about sodium or potassium reacting violently with water, I had a mental picture of what that looked like, because I had seen it happen. But not every one of my students had.
shooting videos and at that time he was charging $100 an hour. About a half dozen undergraduates in the radio/television/film department were working to film reactions. In lieu of a consulting fee, Nick asked us to pay them for their work. That was $50,000 worth of expertise that he donated to the project. The very first reaction we filmed was hydrogen reacting with air. We had the hydrogen trapped in a balloon. There were several undergraduate students, some running the camera, others operating lighting equipment. I held a match in a pair of tongs and approached the balloon. The balloon melted as you anticipate with a match burning. The hydrogen did exactly what you would think it would do when it reacts with air. It provided this huge explosion inside a very small laboratory. While I had warned the crew that it was going to be a loud noise, they weren’t quite prepared for the reality. So we took a few minutes’ break after that first shot while everybody gathered their wits about them. One of the first questions that one of the students asked was “So, are there going to be any other reactions like that, that have a lot of noise with them?” But Nick had trained these guys so well that they knew exactly what it took to capture that video and capture it as accurately as possible. What’s the biggest lesson you learned? What did you take away from the project? One thing is the value of colleagues. That’s not chemical in nature, it’s personal in nature. People who are willing to help out with no benefit to themselves and share their expertise are priceless. For example, the geology department at UT Austin allowed me to videotape an opal worth $25,000 for the video-
…the geology department at UT Austin allowed me to videotape an opal worth $25,000.
© Division of Chemical Education • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • Vol. 86 No. 10 October 2009 • Journal of Chemical Education
1145
Chemical Education Today
Report disc. How in the world could I have ever gotten my hands on something like that, if there had not been colleagues who could and would share? Another lesson is that chemistry provides us such an introit into so many areas of life. If you aren’t amazed by chemistry when you begin a study of it, you will be amazed by it when you finish your study. All the applications of various elements, whether they be metals or nonmetals or metalloids, make an incredible library of fascinating existence. I was reminded once again of the wealth of information that I have yet to learn about chemistry. The project changed the way I look at and teach chemistry. Whether they are chemistry majors or folks taking just one course, I want my students to see the chemistry that surrounds them. So you were able to take the videodisc directly back to your class and use it with your students? How did you feel the first time you were able to use the completed disc in class? The first time, I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning. I’ve been using it off and on in various manifestations for the past 20 years. Sometimes you find yourself in a classroom in which doing a particular reaction is simply out of the question, from a safety standpoint or from a logistical standpoint. Where do I get my hands on enough lithium so I can show somebody how it reacts when I dump it in water? Then, what about the people in the back of the room that said “The people in the front jumped up and I couldn’t see it. Could you do it again?” The answer with the videodisc is “Yeah, sure. Watch!” It’s also a tool to give people an idea about how quickly reactions occur. If you look at a videodisc, one frame is a thirtieth of a second. If you watch the video of hydrogen reacting with air, you can step through the videodisc one frame at a time and show what fraction of a second the reaction took. I can convey that information and it’s not because I have some specific expertise, it’s just that I have the right tool at my fingertips. Any final thoughts? There were a lot of people who contributed in a major way to pulling this off. I think of John Moore and Joe Lagowski right
1146
off the bat, along with those on the list of contributors at the beginning of the videodisc. I had the pleasure and the luxury of being in the right place at the right time. I don’t know why it is I got this idea and drove up to Austin and talked with Joe at the time the Project SERAPHIM group was talking about a video library. But it was a particularly propitious circumstance and I think we managed to do a nice piece of work. Acknowledgments The Periodic Table Videodisc: Reactions of the Elements was part of an effort by Project SERAPHIM to provide alternative approaches that enhance the teaching of descriptive chemistry. It was conceived as a visual database and was produced with support from the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Science and Engineering Education (Project SERAPHIM: Innovative Chemical Education with Computers, grant number 8751262) and The Dreyfus Foundation (Dreyfus/SERAPHIM Electronic Journal). Literature Cited 1. Banks, Alton J. J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 19–20. 2. Moore, John W. J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 20. 3. JCE Software: Periodic Table Live! http://www.chemeddl.org/ collections/ptl/index.html (accessed Jun 2009). 4. A series of Journal articles under the feature title What’s the Use? was based on knowledge gleaned from the filming. See Banks, Alton J. J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 745, 801, 945, 1018; 1990, 67, 14, 109, 215, 298, 373, 588, 1046; 1991, 68, 196; 1992, 69, 18, 99.
Supporting JCE Online Material
http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2009/Oct/abs1144.html Abstract and keywords Full text (PDF) with links to cited URLs and JCE articles
Alton J. Banks is Professor of Chemical Education and Inorganic Chemistry at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8204;
[email protected]. Erica K. Jacobsen is Editor, Secondary School Chemistry, JCE; jacobsen@chem. wisc.edu
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 10 October 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
