Click, Click, Learn!

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My Students

It is a shame that students associate chemistry more with charts and tables than with the world that surrounds them. Through our class motto "Break it down & Build it up," we aim to break down the world into its smallest pieces (atoms), and reconstruct the way we see the universe from the ground up.

My students are an extraordinary bunch, determined to succeed against some tough odds and circumstances.

Just a few years ago, a university study deemed our school a "dropout factory," a label applied to schools with dropout rates of 40% or higher. Roughly 90% of the students I teach are Hispanic/Latino, and many do not have parents who speak English at home, complicating efforts to improve literacy. Over 8 in 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Furthermore, many students do not have computers at home with which they might improve reading skills, look up questions about classwork, or satisfy any sort of supplemental curiosity about the subjects we study. My school's scores on math and science end-of-year exams continue to lag behind where they should be, and for some many of my students the hardest part of the test is not content knowledge, but the literacy skills of reading comprehension.

My Project

As we break down and build up our understanding of our world through chemistry, my students will need to learn how to calculate the reactants and products of various reactions. I wish to kick off this unit with a demo they can see, hear, and smell--and hope they run and tell all their friends about how cool it was. That's where DonorsChoose comes in: with potassium chlorate, gloves, and calculators. In this reaction (wearing protective gloves), I heat up potassium chlorate. Then, I add a gummy bear to the mix, which causes the sugar to react with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. What that looks like for my students, though, is a flaming, screaming test tube, emitting heat, white smoke, and purple light. We will use this demonstration as our anchor through which they begin investigating unit conversions and conservation of mass in reactions, tasks aided by donated calculators. Thus they tie numerical chemistry with real-world applications, and remain engaged in the process.

With potassium chlorate and protective gloves, I can help chemistry regain its "cool." I want my students to remain engaged.

And just as I tied lighting my hands on fire (coated in isopropyl alcohol) to proper lab safety techniques, I want to tie gummy bear immolation to exothermic reactions and matter conservation. With the aid of scientific calculators, my students become scientists actively applying mathematical skills towards real-world chemistry applications, and new career paths emerge.