Any top tips for science project crystal growing?
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Stinley (
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June 20th, 2011
My 10 year old got a crystal growing kit for her birthday. We’ve had one attempt and it turned out a dish of stuff that looked like a purple frozen puddle – sort of icy and watery. The kit was this one
and the instructions inadequate for us two amateurs. The bits we had a problem with were the fact that we were cooking it for about an hour and all the crystals still hadn’t dissolved. We got worried that it was overheating so decided to stop and move on to the next step. But then it wasn’t clear what to do with the mixture so we just put it in a plastic pot supplied in the kit. Should the crystals just have grown from there or was there something else we should have done with the mixture? Or was it that the mixture wasn’t prepared right. Where should we have put it – would a hot radiator have been too hot? Should the pot have been covered?
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6 Answers
The easiest form of growing crystals I know is rock candy, we used to do the experiment in school… here is a link that also has some links to pitfalls to making crystals I hope this helps in your quest. I would suggest trying the rock candy as a go round experiment and see how it goes, plus its edible so its a yummy experiment.
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Crystal growing is SOOO neat, and it depends on the crystals you are trying to make. Evaporating water from a very high concentrated salt solution makes pretty salt crystals.
http://chemistry.about.com/od/growingcrystals/Growing_Crystals.htm
This link is probably more info than you´d ever need, but you can pick a few projects here and try them. It depends on what chemicals you are willing to deal with too. I immediately thought of borax crystals which may be the basis of the kit you bought, but with the above link, there should be better guidelines and even videos of how to do it.
CHEMISTRY IS FUN!!
Hopefully you used the required amount of water and heated it to the right temperature. Maybe you can try again. If any crystals remained after the stated heating time, you should remove all but one. The crystal will grow as the solution cools. Then when the crystal grows big enough, remove from the container.
Oh… it was an Alum crystal… look that up on the link I provided.
Alum was the stuff we used. I will try again using a seed crystal as the website recommends and report back!
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