Ethanol Gasoline Additives

Today I filled my car for the first time with gasoline with the new Ethanol additive and started wondering how you could study this in the classroom. I went searching for information on the Web and here are a couple of good websites I found.

1. How Stuff Works - explains what gasoline additives are and their history starting with lead
2. Department of Energy - good description of ethanol and where it comes from

You can also do some neat experiments with Yeast (the producers of ethanol). Yeast are an important class of fungi and very helpful to humans. There are many other products besides ethanol that they help to produce (bread, yogurt, and cheese to name a few). Check out the following sites.

1. Yeast Experiments - for older students
2. KidWizard - for younger students and a way to study other by products of the fermentation process (i.e. carbon dioxide).
3. Herbarium - a similar experiment to the one above but with a twist. This experiment also provides a control sample. Put a drop of each solution on a microscope slide with some stain and compare the number of colonies from each sample.

Lastly, if you want to do some math related activities why not chart gasoline prices over a period of time (introduce students to Excel or other spreadsheet programs). Try to discover why there is such a fluctuation in prices (weather, war, politics, increase use due to summertime travel).