‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic
for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for
all.’ [Music]
My name is Robert Rountree and I teach seventh grade science in Pittsburgh, New York which
is upstate New York. And we focus on chemistry, so I love to tell the kids that I love chemistry
because I love the Periodic Table. I remember my middle school teachers and I
remember the demonstrations, so when I started teaching I kind of used that as a guide that
I would try to make sure that I would give the kids as many demonstrations as possible.
I think more times than not I use it as what’s called a motivator, meaning you try to do
something…the research says the kids will remember whatever you say first and whatever
you say last and if you’re lucky they will remember something in-between. And that’s
always the trick of putting a lesson together, but if you can grab their attention at the
beginning then you tend to have it for the whole rest of the class. You know the idea
of having a video for each element is brilliant, it really is, because that way in one place
you can go to and find out what it is you want to know about that element and then each
video obviously leads to more and more questions. As soon as a kid mentions an element, or I
mention an element, it will be like go to the video.
[Muted sound from video playing to the class] Good Chemistry! Melt on!
‘The demo of the day is the demo of the demo of the demo of the day!’ [Class cheers]
You know when Brady said he was coming I thought well what can I do, I was thinking, and I
don’t know whether I had just seen the zinc video or I went home and saw the zinc video,
but I just thought that would be a really cool demonstration. You know because there’s
the ‘oh ah’ factor and then YouTube, is it YouTube friendly? I decided in putting
this together that I better find out whether it was legal or not otherwise I was going
to have to do something with dry ice, which would have been awesome but not quite the
‘oh ah’ factor I was looking for. And I called the USA mint and I got the person
who sells coins, and she thought it was an awesome question, and she said well let me
give you some numbers and there is an educational exemption that if you are melting pennies
for educational purposes that that in fact is okay, it is legal. Is white hot hotter
than red hot? Hi Professor my question is: is it aluminum
or aluminium? What’s your favourite element?
What’s your least favourite element? Hi, what’s the most dangerous element?
What first got you interested in science? So I just press space…or do I have to have
the thing on the…? They’re interesting questions aren’t they?
Hey Professor, have you ever played with mercury?
