Hello!

I spent a lot of time catching up on my chemistry last week, and this week has been less observation and more making things helpful to our lab. My mentor has kept me busy and has been walking me through the math to make 50 Millimolar solutions to use in our reactions. Now I’ll be able to tell my students who complain about doing math during science that the two are one and the same, and give some great examples. Maybe it will inspire some of them to take math more seriously!

I was also given the task to study up on a process called “contact angle”, which is used to measure the angle of water droplets on a surface. We use it in the lab to see if some of our modifications have taken to that surface. Our lab uses a boronic acid modification that should change the angle of a water droplet when put onto whatever surface we’ve modified, so we have been doing quite a bit of experiments that involve the contact angle machine. So far our results haven’t been what we have wanted, but the testing continues.

My mentor Katie helped found a program called “Fun with Science” for younger students that visit Rice University. They get to see some of the more dramatic chemical reactions and changes that chemistry is capable of. She let me come to the show to take some pictures and get a few ideas that might benefit my school, and I got to see some fun chemical reactions as well! Students get really excited about chemistry when they see how fun it can be.

Yesterday while Katie was off in meetings, I made my way to the Library and read up on contact angle and spent quite a lot of time searching the stacks for some good books. I found quite a few and read up on the history and math involved with contact angle as well as how to properly implement the procedures involved. Hopefully all that study will come in handy next week as we dive even deeper into  our project! I believe that we are making some good progress, and I’m excited to see what next week brings.