Yesterday we were lucky enough to visit again with Boulder Bluff Elementary (BBE) for Career Day. This year we brought in some photo boards to give students a better idea of what exactly a chemist’s job entails. Students were able to get a glimpse of mammoth ships and engine rooms, the interiors of shipboard and aboveground storage tanks, rescue drills with which we have been involved, and aerials of local shipyards and other marine complexes.
Though we would love to see these guys seek employment as a Marine Chemist or other position working aboard marine vessels, our goal is always to pique and bolster a general interest in science, or “science-y things” as Josh so eloquently put it to the kids. With this purpose in mind, we talked first about what chemists do and see and then moved on to some fun demonstrations.
We used our thermal imaging camera and gas monitor as we have in the past, and some colorimetric gas detection tubes. A cooler full of liquid nitrogen (LN2), however, was our primary means of entertainment. We poured the liquid into flasks of water to make potions, which we used to blow up balloons. Innocent balloon animals were tossed into the cooler, where they instantly shriveled up, but fear not – these came right back to life* when we took them out. For each class’s finale, we broke racquetballs frozen in the LN2 and the kids got to keep some cool color-change pencils (dipped into our cooler first, of course) to remember our experiments by.
*No animals were One balloon animal was hurt during the making of this Career Day.