Chemists all around the world!!! How can I use chemistry for my Halloween project? A few details below:?

Question

I have a project 4 school, entitled "My Chemical Halloween", and I want to use my extensive knowledge of chemistry to sweep the audience off their feet. Sth interesting, worth watching. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Lighting methane bubbles can be impressive. Bubble methane (from a gas jet) through a soapy solution. I use a funnel and an eyedropper to load the funnel with soapy water. Release the bubbles bu shaking the funnel (they should float). Attach a lit wooden splint to a long poles and touch the bubbles with the flame. WOOSH!!!! Caution ..do this far from any flamable material.

Answer 2

Making something that involves your class could be fun - let me suggest something different from explosions and slime. Visit a hobby shop or a craft store and buy some polymer clay - Sculpey is a common brand. This material is incompletely polymerized polyvinylchloride that can be made into an object and then heated in a small oven to complete the polymerization.

Buy a orange and brown Sculpey (squash color is best) and cut the orange into eight blocks. Roll the clay in your hands to soften it. Each block can be easily made into a nice little pumpkin using a simple tool like a paper clip to create ribs on the sides of the pumpkin - plus don't forget to "carve" out the face. Put a little hole on top and make a simple stem using the brown clay.

Use an oven in the lab set to 275 degrees and bake the pumpkin for 15 minutes to complete the polymerization process. After they cool, the pumpkins are just as hard as PVC pipe. (A word of caution: Do not heat this material at an excessive temperature as it will decompose and in the process generate HCl gas.)

A block of Sculpey retails for about $2.00 - you can easily have eight people make pumpkins from each block.

Answer 3

Depends on your grade...dry ice and water and baking soda/vinegar reactions are good for middle school and lower. You could also make oobleck out of glue, borax and water to look like slime. For high school and beyond, burning gases like neon, krypton, etc. can be neat if done in a theatric way since they make different colors. It really depends on how you are planning on presenting the project. I would need a few more details.