Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
You Be the Chemist (YBTC) Kit Chemical Educational Foundation: Arlington VA, 2004. $15 [The kit includes Lesson Plans (80 pp), Teacher’s Manual (49 pp), Resource Guide (15 pp), and a DVD of animated characters.] reviewed by Hal Harris
You Be the Chemist (YBTC) is a kit of materials intended for students from kindergarten through 8th grade that includes lesson plans and teacher notes for 30 activities. Each of the activities is described very briefly (two pages of large type, with space for notes). The Teacher’s Manual provides one short paragraph of possible extensions and an approximately two-sentence Safety Hint for each activity. There are also crossword puzzles and word-hunt games that involve the vocabulary introduced in the corresponding activity. The Chemical Educational Foundation (funded by members of the National Association of Chemical Distributors) has obviously put significant resources into the production of these kits, and the price is so low that it cannot come close to recovering the cost. The materials are attractive and invite experimentation. It is difficult to tell who should be experimenting, however, since the activities are not keyed to the age or grade level of the student, who could range in age from five to 14. The Introduction by Stephen L. Jacobs claims that the experiments “complement emerging national and state learning standards and assessment efforts”. Since those standards include almost everything one could think of, the claim is not difficult to make. However, teachers and home-schooling parents generally are looking for more specific guidance. The activities themselves are a miscellaneous collection, not obviously related to one another, to the ages of the students, or to the principles that they are supposed to teach. I have seen every one of them elsewhere, but there is no credit given to the originators of the ideas or references for more information about them. I have used some of the activities myself, and they can be very effective. For example, the “stacking” of colored salt solutions of various concentrations in translucent straws can be an excellent lesson in density and in scientific reasoning, and the suspension of air bubbles in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide is entertaining, instructive, and beautiful. On the other hand, several of the lessons seem to presuppose understanding of principles that are not appropriate for young children. For example, blobs of glue “dancing” on the surface of a plate of water is explained on the basis of the relative polarity of water and the organic solvent, but does not make it clear that the motive force of the phenomenon is the evaporation of the glue solvent, nor does it say that children of this age should not be expected to understand polarity.
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Despite the title, 17 of the 30 activities in YBTC are actually demonstrations that the teacher presents rather than being experiments for children to do. There are also some questionable explanations. In Cooling in a Flame, it is claimed that unheated hydrocarbon gas is blue, and in The Original Bubble Chamber, students are told to believe without evidence that the trail of bubbles formed when a small grain of salt is dropped into a carbonated beverage is due to the fact that carbon dioxide is attracted to ions. I wonder if students hearing this explanation would ask if ice, when dropped into carbonated beverages, also consists of ions, since ice also causes bubbles to form. Students are expected to figure out the source of triboluminescence when WintOGreen Life Savers (not Wintergreen, as in YBTC ) are crushed by pliers, a challenge that was controversial among researchers for a long time. The Lesson Plans include some strange advice for elementary teachers about chemicals and equipment to which they are unlikely to have access. “Don’t grind nitrates or chlorates in a mortar.” “Don’t heat flammable or volatile liquids (which are the non-volatile liquids?) with an open flame; use a heating mantle instead.” “Preheat the tips of a tongs when picking up a hot vessel, in order to prevent thermal shock (this one is in an experiment in which iron is extracted from cereal with a magnet).” “An Erlynmeyer (sic) flask is used for mixing and storing liquids.” “Crucibles and evaporating dishes can be heated to over 2000 °” (this one is in an experiment about the electrostatics of puffed rice). “Volumetric glassware is often marked with a “20”, indicating the temperature at which it is calibrated.” “Don’t use compressed air to dry laboratory glassware.” (How many K–8 teachers have lab glassware, let alone compressed air?) “Acetone is a reliable rinsing agent for glassware, but should be removed with a final rinse of distilled water.” “Use ‘inert stopper grease’ to prevent ground-glass fittings from becoming stuck together.” The DVD animations were produced by the Art Institute of Washington, which may also have had responsibility for the science in them. I don’t know whether a generation accustomed to Shrek will respond to the cruder, but still effective, cartoon characters Kelvin (who keeps his safety goggles on his forehead throughout), and Newton (a knowit-all who eschews them altogether). The dialogue is pretty corny, but that is not necessarily negative, since children are likely to respond to humor. I doubt whether the DVD would be as well-received by eighth graders as by kindergartners, however. It is distressing that the science presented is so often wrong or misleading. From the DVD one learns that alchemists were selfish but scientists are not, that chemists invented the microscope, that the properties of substances are the same in all three phases, that salt water and fresh water are apparently immiscible, that objects are visible because they are more dense than air, that it is possible to make an ice cube by freezing a puddle of water, that water molecules
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Chemical Education Today edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
slow down and “fit more tightly together” when they freeze, that changes of state occur only at the boiling point, that solutions are “self-mixing” mixtures. Students are also likely to be confused when they see two liquids mixed and three layers (corn syrup, water, and olive oil) result. In focusing on some of the shortcomings of You Be the Chemist I have not given enough credit to its strengths. The goal of providing chemistry and physics experiments that younger children can do is a laudable one, and the Chemical Educational Foundation has collected a few laboratory experiments and many demonstrations that may be incorpo-
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rated into elementary science curricula. There is a real need for teaching materials like this. I think that many elementary and middle-school teachers will try some of the activities, but they will have to look elsewhere to find background materials that will allow them to teach them with confidence. The package is slick (despite some typographical and spelling errors) and the DVD is a bonus. The price is excellent. Hal Harris is a member of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Missouri–St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63121;
[email protected].
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