"It's fricking blowing my mind"

My Honors Chemistry class is just starting to learn about the mole.  For HW (the first one I have given since September) they had to watch the following TED video:

While it doesn't teach them how to use the mole, it got them really excited to learn about how to use it in chemistry.  I started the class with a DO NOW

What, in your every day lives, could be expressed in terms of moles?

I gave them a chance to consider it and then discuss with their groups.  We got some really good answers like sand on the Jersey shore, Doritos, and hair on a human head.  I let them figure out how to calculate hairs on someone's head (someone used their iPhone to Google how many hairs are on a human head.  FYI 90,000-150,000) and we figure it is somewhere in the range of 9x10^-24; they decided that it was not at all useful for every day things.

Then the questions started.

"What if we added up all the hairs on every human head on the planet?"

"What if we added body hair?"

"Eyelashes?"

Someone grabbed a computer and started Googling and found that if you added up all of the cells in every human on the planet, you would only have about half a mole.

The mole is still not useful because the numbers are still unbelievably small.  So then I pull out 1 mole of water (18mL) which is about the amount that fits in the palm of your hand.  

One girl says, "Wait. That's 1 mole? You mean that small amount of water is the same as if we covered the Earth in 5 miles of donuts?! This is fricking blowing my mind!!"

I love it when it clicks.

Mole Movie Posters

Every year, the American Chemical Society has a poster contest.  They pick a theme (usually some sort of movie) and the students are to create mole poster based around it.  Unfortunately, the contest is set for 10/23 and rarely am I in the mole conversions unit when it happens so my students would have no clue what they were making this poster for.  So I decided last year to just do it for my classes.  Their assignment is this:

"Recreate any movie poster so that The Mole is the theme."

I am all about not giving specific guidelines so I let them pick any movie and do with it whatever they want.  Some students hand draw their posters, some use Photoshop.  Some pick very popular movies and some pick obscure ones that are their favorites.  The key is the creativity that they put into it.  I also tell them in advance that the class will vote on their favorite and that person wins a prize.  I never tell them what the prize is so they always think it is something really, really cool.  This year the prize was one of those squishy ladybug toys that when you squeeze it, it expands in a different spot.  I am not describing it well, but I found it in the $1 part of Target.

The kids got really into this year and several handed the assignment in days in advance.  They were arguing with each other over who got to do what poster, but in the end I had no duplicates anyway.  I want to share the amazing work they did, so here is the photostream from Flickr.  Enjoy!!

I love it when they get it

I introduced the Mole today in my Honors Chemistry class.  For those of you who don't remember HS chemistry, the mole is a generic term that represents a specific amount of a substance, specifically 6.02x10²³ of a substance.  To put the size of this number in perspective, if you were to collect 1 mole of pennies and distribute those pennies equally to every human on the planet, each person would receive approximately one TRILLION dollars.  It's a lot of stuff.

My honors class is unlike any class I have in that they try to distract me from teaching by asking me complex questions related to the topic.  So, after I shock them with the above example, one student starts asking if you laid the pennies end to end, would it stretch around the world.  I said it would probably stretch around the world a few thousand times.  This answer was not acceptable for her so I told her to get the netbook out and look it up; Google the dimensions of a penny and the size of the Earth and figure out how many pennies you would need.  Just to prove me wrong, she rushes over, grabs the computer and is off working for the next 15 minutes.  (FYI, I was way off.  1 mole of pennies would wrap around the Earth approximately 899 TRILLION times)

After a few minutes I am talking about how to calculate the mass of 1 mole of a compound and a different student wanted to know how many moles of water are in a human being.  Not knowing how much water is actually in the human body, I told her (surprise, surprise) to Google it.  She picks up her iPhone and starts her search.  Unfortunately she ran short of time and energy before she could figure out an answer.  Turns out they only have percentages of water content listed on sites and not grams.  We needed a bathroom scale to actually measure someone's weight.  Guess what I am bringing in tomorrow!

I don't really care if they can calculate the number of moles of sodium in a sample.  What I do want is for them to be inquisitive, to know that they are free to ask questions, to know they are free to ignore me and work on something that has more meaning for them.  I want more days like today.