painless wrote:mac_d wrote:If any of you happen to know of any easily cleanable, relatively safe science experiments that are fun and doable from the suburbs of Glasgow, let me know
I've got a couple. The flaming handkerchief with water/alcohol mix. No clean up, just a warm, damp hankie! And maybe the Cartesian diver.
Ooo and the crushed can. Take a large can (like an olive oil can) with a sealable spout. Put a little water in and boil until the water has nearly all gone. Bung in the stopper and cool. Steam condenses, pressure drops and can collapses.
Both good ones. Mac, if you do the one with alcohol, add a bit of table salt to the mix, it makes the flame easier to see. I speak from experience when I say that you can burn yourself quite easily thinking the thing is not lit because the ethanol flame is difficult to see in direct sunlight.
Also, you can do cool things with different density liquids, because they don't mix. should be able to stack alcohol, water, honey, washing up liquid, and different kinds of cooking oils into different bands without mixing.
This might be a helpful website:
https://sciencebob.com/category/experiments/
Also one that's not there, but is pretty fun is to make pH indicators from red cabbage. If you boil the red cabbage in some water, the dye leaks out, and it changes colour in different pHs. Different from a standard UI scale, but it's still cool to try out.
There may be a few more, but my brain has dropped out of lab tech mode for the day.
Also, in terms of safety, most things should be fine, because gas pressure and chemical reactions are normally the ones that are potentially dangerous, and lab chemicals are relatively hard to get hold of.
Also again, if you want to do anything with circuits, pick up a BBC Micro:Bit and the breakout board for it. They're amazing bits of kit, and they can learn the basics of coding (using CodeBlocks) as well as some circuit stuff.