07/15/2025
Wrapping up STEM Summer Camp last week: In the mornings, students spent a lot of time looking at how magnets needed to be oriented in order to produce an electrical voltage. Most of the groups were able to get an LED to light up, but almost everyone ran into some amount of frustration with the design component. It was an excellent learning opportunity for the kids because they were able to get real-time feedback. They were able to experiment with seeing how the distance of a magnet, the orientation of the magnet, and even the type of magnet affected the desired output voltage.
In the afternoon, we worked in Ripon College's new chemistry laboratory. Dr. Bryan Nell taught us inorganic coordination chemistry, where we took pink cobalt chloride, ethylenediamine, hydrochloric acid, and hydrogen peroxide to produce a beautiful sparkling green crystal complex. Additionally, we got a tour of the new building, new lab spaces, some fun liquid nitrogen demonstrations, and redox reactions by lighting some gummy bears on fire with potassium chlorate.
Dr. Willoughby taught the students organic chemistry by having them mix vinegar and an alcohol to produce an oil that had a pleasant smell of bananas. On Friday, we took our banana oils and ran them through the new 9 tesla nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine to see exactly what we made. After that, he went on and took the students through the process of making aspirin by combining aniline and acetic anhydride with water to create acetanilide, which is an analogue of aspirin. Because the aniline was impure, the fire crystal that was created was impure, and thus we had to recrystallize our samples after purifying our solutions with activated charcoal. Through vacuum filtration, we ended up with a pure, shiny white crystal, analyzed by the melting point.
