Chemical reaction

Bravo! makes slime

By Chris Horn

When she first arrived at Carolina's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, assistant professor Linda Shimizu developed a simple formula that almost never fails to produce a positive reaction:

• Supply several USC chemistry Ph.D. students with enough materials to perform simple but interesting experiments for an hour
• send them out to Columbia-area elementary, middle, and high school classes
• wait for students to respond to the chemical reactions: “Whoa, awesome!” “Can I touch it?” “How does that work?”
• repeat experiments in other classrooms to get even more students enthused about science.Shimizu came up with the Chemistry Outreach Program as a way to tap into the teaching talents of USC's chemistry and biochemistry graduate students. She wasn't sure how receptive schoolteachers would be to the idea of turning over their classrooms for the hour-long presentations, but the results have been overwhelmingly positive.
  

“We did the first show in 2000, and we've been to nearly 50 schools so far,” Shimizu said. “It's been wonderful for the USC graduate students doing the presentations, and the students in the schools have really responded.”

Charity Brannen, a Ph.D. candidate who plans to graduate in December, has volunteered for the school shows for three years. She first went to Dutch Fork Middle School and did eight shows in two days for 300 students. The teacher begged her to come back, and she did.

“There's one experiment we do in a beaker where the liquid oscillates from yellow to purple. Their faces light up, and they think it's the coolest thing,” Brannen said. “They see me standing up there—someone not too much older than them—and they think, ‘I can do that.’ ”

Which is pretty much the whole point of the presentations. Research shows that American students begin to lose interest in science about the time they hit middle school and beyond. Shimizu's program tries to demonstrate science in a hands-on way and explain the relevance of chemistry to everyday life.

“I see kids who are the geeky types sitting on the first row, and I can relate—that's how I was when I was their age,” said second-year Ph.D. student C.J. Stephenson. “Then there are the kids sitting in the back who act bored. But when you freeze a flower in liquid nitrogen and shatter it on the table, they're like, ‘Wow!’ ”

Those ‘wow’ moments come fairly often during the hour-long shows. Ph.D. student Dana Broughton tried to explain to a group of sixth graders at Summit Parkway Middle School how polymer chains link together to make nylon and other synthetic materials. It wasn't clear how much the young students were following her explanation, but a picture paints a thousand words. The green-yellow mixture in the beaker she was holding captured their attention, and when she pulled out a gob of the goo, they cried out with one voice: “Slime!”

Not every experiment works perfectly. Stephenson recalled the time he froze a racquetball in liquid nitrogen and threw it down on the floor to demonstrate the brittle nature of frozen objects. The carpeted floor foiled his efforts again and again, and he finally hurled the ball against the wall in frustration.

And not every experiment imparts the intended message. Brannen once showed a group of middle schoolers how she extracts DNA from bananas. The gooey extract looked very much like, well, snot.

“They looked at it and said, ‘Eww, I'm never eating bananas again!’ ”

Then there was the case of the amorous grade-schooler who thought there might be some chemistry between him and Brannen. On the evaluation he and his classmates were asked to write on the chemistry presentation, the young Don Juan wrote: “It's nice to know there are pretty women in science. By the way, I was the red-headed boy in the front row.”

Well, if banana DNA won't attract them to science, maybe a school-age crush will. In any event, score another success for the Chemistry Outreach Program.