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| Chromatography sample set up |
Earlier this school year as I was planning out my lesson on matter for my science seminar class, along comes the
Flinn Scientific -Flinn Fax flyer in my school mailbox. What perfect timing! I had planned on doing chromatography, a method for separating mixtures, and here is a nice new twist on the technique.
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| Sample set up |
I started the students on day one with simply asking them to set up a test paper with all the different brands of pens that I had available. The following day I gave them designs to copy. They had to use their findings to determine which pens to use. Everyone was successful as you can see by the pictures below. In the future I might even use different solvents to see if they can get results that differ from those they got here (we used water as our solvent but I gave them both water soluble and non-soluble pens).
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| Chromatography samples running |
I am continually amazed by what activities students are most fascinated by. This one was a huge success. Many simply tried to make interesting patterns of their own.
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| Student Sample 1 |
I placed my samples in plastic bags so that they wouldn't get wet. You can see here the student's work to copy my example. I will now have these samples to use again next year which will save me a lot of preparation time.
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| Student Sample 2 |
Included in this photo you can see the sample disks that the students had completed on day one which show the pigment patterns generated by each type of pen available for use.
