On September 11th, MEM-C hosted its 2nd annual “MEM-C Day” on UW-Seattle’s campus. During the event, MEM-C had the pleasure of hosting 23 students and 9 parents from the greater-Seattle homeschooling community for a day of hands-on science experiments. A group of 17 graduate students from the Cossairt, Golder, Reed, and Xiao labs led the students through interactive activities that showcased how nanoscale structures facilitate macroscopic properties, including color and long-range structural integrity. This outreach event was hosted in a UW Department of Chemistry teaching laboratory, which offered these young students the experience of navigating within a real lab space.
The day’s programming started with the Golder group teaching students how to prepare polymer networks that, with enough stirring, turn into bouncy balls. The elasticity of the bouncy balls changes by altering the ratios of various ingredients.
Next up was the Cossiart lab, whose members helped the students prepare gold nanoparticles by simply combining two ingredients in water. Unlike bulk gold we are used to seeing, these nanoparticles appear pink or purple in solution, telling us about the size of these individual nanoparticles and how these particles interact with light.
The Reed lab then had the students explore how light interacts with materials, depending on the thickness of that material. Students were able to design their own bookmarks that would then have a thin layer of clear nail polish deposited on top. Because of the way this ultra-thin layer of nail polish reflects light, an iridescent rainbow is deposited on top of the students’ creations.
To finish off a full day of science, the Xiao lab worked with the students to build models of porous molecules out of marshmallows and toothpicks to learn about the crystal structure of materials. To further understand materials at the nanoscale, students then wrote messages with “invisible” ink. Upon heating up their seemingly blank papers with a blow-dryer, their message would appear as the water molecules left the ink structure and the newly colored structure would reveal itself.
A MEM-C Day parent sent this follow-up note: “Thank you so much for hosting this event. It really jump sparked my son into loving science even more. On the way home he ordered materials so he could recreate some of the experiments you did.”
MEM-C Day was organized by Prof. Matthew Golder, Prof. Andrea Carroll, MEM-C Education and Training Fellow Eden Tzanetopoulos, a Ph.D. student in the Gamelin lab, and Matt Elardo and Lucy Miller, both Ph.D. students in the Golder lab. We’d like to thank the volunteers, students, and parents for making this year’s MEM-C Day such a success!
