Teach17

A collection of hands-on demos, experiments and challenges to bring the chemistry department to life at the open morning. Pick a handful to run brilliantly rather than spreading thin across all of them.

1. Elephant’s toothpaste – a rapid foam eruption from hydrogen peroxide and yeast, shooting a metre or more into the air. Loud, messy and visible from across the hall, so it does the recruiting for you.
2. Traffic light reaction – a clear liquid that flips from red to amber to green and back again right in front of visitors, with no obvious trick to explain how.
3. Make your own lava lamp – oil, water, food colouring and an effervescent tablet layered in a bottle, sealed up and taken home still bubbling.
4. Flame tests – metal salts burned over a Bunsen to throw out vivid greens, purples and reds, a great hook into a quick chat about atomic structure without it feeling like a lecture.
5. Dry ice bubbles – soap bubbles filled with dry ice fog that visitors pop themselves, watching the cloud spill out and roll across the table.
6. Instant snow or slime station – a hands-on take-home make, with a thirty-second explanation of the polymer chemistry that makes it work.
7. Extract your own DNA – strawberries or peas mashed, filtered and precipitated with alcohol so visitors see real strands of DNA with their own eyes, not just a diagram.
8. Copper plating demo – a coin or key electroplated live in a beaker, a nice visual way into questions about electrolysis.
9. Crack the mystery powder – a short forensic-style challenge where visitors run a few safe indicator tests to identify an unknown white powder.
10. Rocket fizz launchers – film canister or effervescent tablet rockets fired outside on a timer, always the loudest queue on the field.
11. pH rainbow wall – a row of test tubes or a large indicator gradient visitors can shift by adding drops of acid or alkali themselves.
12. Non-Newtonian fluid tray – a cornflour and water mixture that visitors can punch, squeeze and watch turn from solid to liquid in their hands.
13. Chemistry trivia leaderboard – a live high score chart running all morning, giving people a reason to come back and try to beat their score.
14. Student research and project showcase – posters or screens of the strongest student investigations, with the students themselves on hand to talk visitors through them.
15. Periodic table scavenger hunt – element samples or cards hidden around the stand, with a short answer sheet to fill in as visitors track them down.
16. Careers wall with real pathways – actual alumni stories showing the route from GCSE or A-level chemistry into apprenticeships, degrees or jobs, ideally with a QR code linking to short video clips.
17. Build a molecule station – molecular model kits laid out so visitors can build simple molecules themselves, paired with a quick name-that-molecule challenge.