Wednesday 5 February 2014

New School, New Show!

Regular readers will know that Science2U often works with Mersey&CheshireSTEM to deliver Chemistry at Work events at Daresbury labs in Cheshire.
During one of those events we met the communications officer from Mexichem UK in Runcorn.
After some negotiations we were sponsored to produce a show on the theme of solids, liquids and gases to be delivered to a Runcorn school. Mexichem make refrigerants and asthma inhaler propellants among other things.
So we have created a show for secondary schools which looks at the properties of materials and changes in state.

This week we delivered it to the chosen school Sandymoor free school in Runcorn.

As a very new school Sandymoor is still small altho' every time we go there are new pupils and something exciting is happening. This time there were more portable classrooms but just down the road we could see their new building emerging over the tree tops. They should be able to move in next September.
For now they don't really have a space large enough to contain the whole school so we agreed to deliver the show twice which was actually good for us because it meant we got two bites at the cherry.
We took along our latest gizmos - two huge gunge tubes - which are wonderful for demonstrating viscosity and so easy to pop one in a cold place and one somewhere warm to show how temperature affects the liquid.



We looked at some very unusual solids, some really strange liquids and used lots of dry ice.

Mexichem had given us some amazing facts about their asthma propellant - approx 8.4 billion doses are used every year.
We really like this show, it has some great aspects so with a little tweaking we are going to put it on our regular programme - all we need is a name!