Exocharmic Reactions

Thanks to Bassam Shakhashiri for the pic and for including the Ramette article in his outstanding series of demo books.

"The joy of chemical experimentation has been well recognized, at least from the early days of alchemy, and our appreciation of chemical charm probably dates back to the prehistoric discovery of ways to make and control fire. Therefore, it seems useful to coin the term exocharmic reaction (from the Greek exo-, turning out) and, particularly in our role as chemistry teachers, to seek and share techniques for liberating as much charm as possible from the chemical changes our students in the laboratory and classroom demonstrations." ~ Richard W. Ramette

The above few sentences come from Richard W. Ramette's article in the January, 1980 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. You can get the full test on the ACS website (for a fee) or - as I found the article - in the front of Bassam Shakhashiri's of Chemical Demonstrations: a handbook for teachers of chemistry, vol 1 (the full article of which Google has posted for free).

The gist of the article - which really should be read in its four-page entirety - is that the most exocharmic reactions must be presented with content connections, enough prior knowledge (but not too much), safe methods, and the proper attitude and showmanship from the demonstrator.

There's a lot more to it, but I'll let you read the full text for yourself.

There's also a nice, follow-up article from George M Bodner from a 2001 volume of University Chemistry Education from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

STEEL: From Start to Finish

The music moves the story along nicely, but the images of massive, molten pours of iron sluicing through a steel mill doesn't really need much jazzing up.

This video provides an overview from the mining of iron ore, the smelting of ore into pure iron, the addition of non-iron ingredients into the steel melt, casting the steel, forging and de-scaling the steel sheets, heat- and cold-treating the steel, and coating some of the steel for various applications.

Honestly, it's a great overview of the processes involved.

Extraction of Iron (Blast Furnace)

Any chance somebody out there would want to add in a little Ennio Morricone music overtop of this video to make things a bit more exciting?

The process in reality (as shown below) is just a bit more exciting, but the chemistry explained above is fairly spot on (if a bit simplified) as to what's happening in the furnace itself.

Bridge to Classroom

My bridge didn't survive the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault. I'm not surprised about that, though, since Warren Zevon has been telling me to for years that California is going to slide into the ocean. I apparently helped a digital version to speed up that slide a bit thanks to Bridge to Classroom, an engineering simulation in which you (or your students) can test various bridge designs (beam girder, steel arch, cantilever-truss, suspension, and cable-stay) with a mixture of safety features (bearings, ductile materials, shock absorbers, and shear links) against earthquakes of eight different magnitudes after learning a little bit about the challenges presented in the San Francisco Bay.

Here's to hoping they built the real one better than my beam-girder/suspension/bean-girder model did.

Track Features - Flora, MS Derailment from Thermal Expansion Sun Kink

Sadly the video is all animation, but that's understandable considering the derailment mess that would have been created (see the video below).

If ever students ask why thermal expansion matters, here's a very clear example.

ASM Materials Camp 2006

"I heard that...we're going to be breaking some stuff and seeing what's inside of it. That's what I do at home, anyway, and this way my mom doesn't yell at me."

Great summary there, Dan, of what we do in the teachers camps, too.

I really want to get up to Einseman some summer to see what the students are doing at their summer camp, particularly the Eisenman at the ASM headquarters because it pulls from students all around the country.

Blacksmith demo at Eisenman Materials Camp 2012

Yeah, most of the time when we have high school students forging something, we aren't happy.

Here, though, we're thrilled to see the students at the Eisenman student material science camp doing a bit of forging.

I need to get up to one of the summer student camps sometime to see just how cool they are.

...or how hot in this case...