• Question: What was the most exciting thing you ever did in a science lesson at school ?

    Asked by zierty to Daniela, Hannah, Ian, Jono, Mark on 19 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by harrison123.
    • Photo: Jono Bone

      Jono Bone answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Hi zierty,

      My favourite was the screaming jelly baby trick in chemistry. Have you seen it? This is what it looks like:

      Potassium chlorate is a very strong oxidizing agent that oxidizes the sugar in the jelly baby almost instantaneously causing it burst into giant flames make a screaming sound as gas escapes the test tube.

    • Photo: Mark Hodson

      Mark Hodson answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Hi Zierty,

      We did a really cooled experiment dropping sodium into water and watching it explode – I don’t think they let schools do it now because of health and safety. Generally the things I enjoyed most were chemistry practicals that involved loud bangs or doing experiments to make brightly coloured chemicals.

      cheers

      m

    • Photo: Ian Wilson

      Ian Wilson answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Hi zierty,

      Ooh I loved the practicals in Biology lessons. We did loads of dissections, which were a bit gory but really fun. I dissected a mouse (cut myself with a scalpel – that hurt…), a heart, lungs and a bull’s eye. The eye practical ended with someone sticking his finger into the eye and moving it round, saying “My hand can seeeeeee yoooouuuuu!” (Don’t do it – teacher’s don’t like it!).

      What cool experiments have you done?

      Cheers,

      Ian

    • Photo: Daniela Plana

      Daniela Plana answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Hi zierty!

      I also did the experiment (well, actually watched the teacher do it) that Mark mentioned of putting sodium in water… that was really cool. First it kind of sizzles, but after a little while it actually goes boom! For years after there was a bit of a black mark on the lab ceiling from that… oops.

      I also liked in biology when we studied the eye… we had a cow’s eye (which is huge!) and we opened it up. It was quite cool to see that when you looked through it, everything was upside-down. That’s because eyes actually see everything upside-down, but our brains know that and turn images right-side up for us!

      What have you liked in yours??

      Daniela

    • Photo: Hannah Brotherton

      Hannah Brotherton answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Hi zierty,
      We did an experiment where they gave us an eyedrop with a special chemical in it. The chemical makes the pupil the size of your entire eye. So you just have a black eye essentially. The pupil is so big you can see into the eye no problem. It made us all look like fish 😀

      But the side-effect was the pupil doesn’t go back down to normal size for a while, so everyone had to wear eye patches for the whole day lol

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