Chemistry, it is an important and fun subject for all students, but can be extremely boring without projects that can hold the student’s interest. The projects need to be fun, exciting and yet safe, especially for those students just starting out. Something as simple as mixing cleaning reagents such as ammonia and bleach can result in something deadly, such as chlorine gas! It now becomes the question of how to come up with ideas for school chemistry projects. Two things that need to be determined first, the age of the students and the budget for the class. Both will affect the type of projects one can do!
Some very good early projects for any type of science can be found in the Magic School Bus Books. This series by Scholastic is exceptional for getting young children interested in science of all types. There are videos as well, but the books have small sections with very interesting projects listed, and most are very simple and demonstrate basic principles. One that the class will really find delicious is The Magic School Bus gets Baked in a Cake. A book about kitchen chemistry. It is food and safe as a topic, the class can literally eat it up!
Older classes, but not at the high school level should check out the Horrible Science Series, with Chemical Chaos. This book by Nick Arnold also has some very simple projects listed and all the ingredients are easily available. It also covers the problems of when chemistry goes wrong, and how you can have disastrous results! The projects are strange, but safe and demonstrate some of the valid scientific principles of chemistry. It should be in any science teachers library, and loaned to the students!
Now come chemistry projects for the high school students, and those can be much more complex. These students should possess the maturity to try things a bit more complex and daring than the younger students. They need to come up with interesting topics or chemical questions, then search projects involving those questions. They could try something such as “Chemistry projects creating scents”, Google gives 141,000 hits for that phrase! Doing it this way, you will easily find topic projects on various aspects of chemistry, and you can make them as complex or simple as time and the budget allows!
That is how to come up with school chemistry projects!
