National Chemistry Week is celebrated at SAU

by: amber barr
Staff Writer

On Oct. 16, about 72 kids of all ages came to the St. Ambrose University Campus to participate in the National Chemistry Week activities.

At the open house, there were four rooms with close to 20 kids each, participating in different activities, simultaneously. One room had the kids making their own bubble solution and complex bubble wands. Another room focused on pressure changes where the participants made rockets using Alka Seltzer. They also made deep-sea divers, or Cartesian divers. Finally, there was a the “Secrets Room.”

“The secrets room was my room,” Marge Legg, chemistry professor, said. “We used magic ink to write messages to each other and then decode them with a special marker. We had talking cups that said ‘science is fun,’ and white beads that turned colors under a black light.”

Another room played with polymers, making silly putty and bouncing balls.

National Chemistry Week is sponsored by the American Chemical Society. Each year a different theme is chosen to attract kids to science and make it fun for them.

“This year’s theme was toys,” Legg said.

The event required the help of about 20 volunteers which included science, education and nursing majors, as well as some former students.

"My favorite experience from the day was when all of the children would walk in to the room and see all of the experiments that we had set up for them,” Danielle Geerts said. “They would walk or run to a lab bench and talk really loud to the children either across from them or next to them. They were absolutely adorable and very excited to learn about their projects and about how our projects would excite them.”

“I believe that the children's favorite experiment or project would have been the uv-color changing beads,” Geerts said. “The beads change when they are out in the sun, or a source of uv-light."

Geerts was one of the volunteer workers for the open house. She is a math education major, and is also planning to get an endorsement in chemistry.

Usually the target age group is ninth through 12 graders, but St. Ambrose invited children as young as those in kindergarten.