Schools Collaborations and Projects Jul 2018

Important dates for calendars:

YEARS 7 and 8:  SALTERS FESTIVAL.  19th JUNE 2018.  Teams of 3 students compete in two practicals. There will be accompanying teacher activities.

YEARS 8 through 11:  TOP OF THE BENCH (formerly Welsh Chemical Olympiad) 12th DECEMBER 2018. Rather than have multiple heats during the term which meant that successful teams would have to ask for 4 different days off, we thought we have changed the format this year and will host all activities.  There will be a practical component (details sent out in September) as well as the usual Year-specific content questions.  We will have some activities for teachers.  Winning team will go on to the national contest.

Year 12:  SCHOOLS ANALYST.  16th JANUARY 2019.   Teams of 3 students compete in two practicals. Winning team goes to a national contest.  We will have some days in the autumn/winter where schools can come in and practice for this contest.

As well as this, we will also be hosting schools to come in and perform experiments in our labs.

We currently offer:

YEARS 9 THROUGH 11:

• Synthesis of “smelly” esters  (includes liquid-liquid extraction)
• Synthesis of aspirin and wintergreen (includes vacuum filtration)
• Acid-Base Titration (using both burettes and drop counters)
• Spectroscopy of Inks

YEARS 12 and 13:

From WJEC Book (with value added):

• Titration Using a pH Probe (with data loggers and drop counters)
• Synthesis of a Liquid Organic Product (2-chloro-2-methylpropane) and we’ll do NMR to confirm
• Synthesis of a Solid Organic Product (aspirin) and we’ll do IR and NMR to confirm
• Two Step Synthesis (of 3-nitrobenzoic acid) done in 2 hours
• Planning a Sequence of Tests to Identify Organic Compounds and we’ll do IR and NMR to confirm
• We are also adding some of the OCR experiments including synthesis of cyclohexene and determination of copper in brass

We will have dates for this in September, January, around Easter, June and July as well as Wednesday afternoons during October through December and February through May.