Class 1 and 2: Milk Experiment and Molecular Structure Review

Class 1: Milk lab Experiment and Doing Labs In General

After watching a video showing whole milk, food coloring, and dish soap mix in a bizarre matter, we were tasked with forming a hypothesis about why such a phenomenon would happen and create a useful experiment in order to test our hypothesis.

Hypothesis: 

Dish soap has the ability to attract fat molecules and break them apart, thus creating a chaotic mess. The food coloring is in the mixture simply to show the dish soap breaking apart milk’s fat.

In order to test our hypothesis, we used the following equipment and decided to test many different solutions copying the same method used in the video.

Procedure:

1.     Pour whole milk into a circular dish

2.     Dab 2-3 drops of water coloring in the circular dish

3.     Dip toothpick into dish soap, and then dip toothpick into solution

4.     Observe chemical reaction of the solution

5.     Repeat above process with different solutions using same dish soap

Though our experiment is far from perfect and contained numerous human errors, we discovered that solutions that contained the most amounts of fat (whole milk) reacted most vigorously when dabbed with dish soap whilst solutions which had less fat (skim milk) or no fat at all (coffee/orange juice) did not react much at all.

Equipment used

Solutions

Important notes

After our first experiment, Mr. Quick went over some key aspects on doing effective experiments in general. Hopefully next time when my team and I are given an experiment, we can complete it in a more efficient and professional way.

Class 2

In our second class we simply went over some basic chemistry topics from Chem last year. We mainly focused on molecular shapes and did a worksheet on different molecules. We had a brief review of the octet rule and different bonds also.