Student Activity: Rutherford’s Black Box

We are most accustomed to making observations directly with our eyes. Students therefore often find it conceptually challenging to comprehend the reasoning and logic used by scientists studying atoms that they cannot directly see. This activity allows the students to...

Teacher Demo/Student Activity: Disappearing Volume

In this activity, student mix a given quantity of salt with a fixed volume of water. Mass and volume measurements are made before and after mixing to determine if these quantities change. Students observe that mass is conserved during dissolving while volume is not....

Teacher Demo/Student Activity: Finding the electron

Prior to Thomson’s work it was thought that the atoms of each element were unique, invisible particles, or that atoms were made of subatomic particles that had significant mass compared to the atom as a whole. Thomson used Crookes tubes to disprove both of these ideas...

Teacher Demo/Student Activity: The Candle Family

This activity is a good opportunity for students to exercise their hypothesis-generating skills, practice making quantitative observations, and apply what they have learned about the fire triangle and the gas tests. Revisit the fire triangle with students, explaining...

Teacher Demo/Student Activity: There’s Iron in your Cereal?

This demo shows how flakes of iron can be extracted from iron-fortified cereals with the use of a strong magnet. The demo shows a physical separation process and provides students with a good example of how one component (the iron) can be separated from a heterogenous...
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