Footy colours

[Pm706Narrogin]

Following on from the other thread about starch, this is the "footy colours" experiment

The idea is it's a precipitation prac. The students have to perform either two or three reactions in a test tube and the precipitate colours will form bands in the footy team's colour. The one we do is a modified version of an older footy colours prac from a book that's so old it's about the WAFL teams cause WA didn't have national teams yet.

It's mostly used during the year 9 chemical science stream when they're doing chemical reactions but we've also had our upper school chemistry teachers use it too.

Our sheet's set up so the students do the 16 non-WA teams and then once they've got an idea of what chemicals make what colour, they have to try and make the Eagles and Dockers colours.

WA defaults to 0.1M for most things but for other states, dilute lead nitrate should still provide the colours you need so it can be used with lower school. I did try using silver nitrate for the yellow precipitate reaction but silver iodide is more of a chalky yellow, not the bright yellow the footy teams use. The advantage of this prac though is it's very small scale so the amount students are exposed to (and the subsequent waste generated that we have to deal with) is minimal.

I've linked both the teacher and student sheets. Near identical but the teacher sheet gives the answers to the Eagles and Dockers for the teachers. Just modify it to suit your region. Only additional thing to be provided on our end from the equipment list is a couple of containers to collect the used test tubes.

[RosalieL]

Thank you so much! It looks great!

[Pm706Narrogin]

Yeah it's always well received by both teachers and students.

It can become one of those dreaded "end of term fun" pracs but I'd much rather clean small amounts of mess contained to test tubes than the gigantic messes some of the other "fun" pracs make

[Wayne]

RiskAssess has 0.1M lead nitrate as a teacher only chemical, up to 0.03M for 11-12 and only 0.003M for 7-12.

[Pm706Narrogin]

I'll be honest I'm as confused as you are that RiskAssess comes up with that number yet the Department of Education in WA employs safety consultants who have deemed 0.1M safe for general use (because we don't use RiskAssess). Someone's risk assessments aren't adding up.

I'd be curious to see if 0.003M lead nitrate would still work. All it needs is for the precipitation reaction to work so if we can do it with even lower concentrations that would be awesome

[RosalieL]

We use 0.001M here for precipitation pracs and it still gives a good result