Fume Hood Experiments
Our Science Centre is fantastically well-resourced allowing for a wide range of experiments to be done that wouldn’t normally be possible.
Here you can see Year 12 Chemistry students making full use of the student fume hoods in one of the Chemistry labs in our superbly well-resourced Science Centre. Normally a Chemistry lab is equipped with one fume hood which is for teacher demonstrations. But in SCI202, the four student fume hoods allow students to safely work with volatile chemicals which have fumes that would be dangerous if inhaled. This allows students to be practitioners rather than observers and complete a greater range of experiments than would otherwise be possible, thus deepening their learning. Look at the amazing range of colours the students produced when they were investigating ligand reactions!
“We were learning about complex ions and how different ligands can cause the compound to have different colours. We did an experiment to test this by taking note of the colour of the compound before and after different ligands are added.” Nubtong Vanisri, 12S
“We investigated how changing the ligands affects the colour of the transition metal complexes by carrying out a few displacement reactions – for example, when chlorine replaces water in a copper II nitrate solution, the colour changes from a pale blue to a yellow/green colour. We then went on to understand the theory behind why these colours change and it is all related to electrons gaining energy to move to different energy levels and different colours being absorbed.” Jing-Wen, 12B
