Experimenting with Gallium
Atticus had heard about the element Gallium, and how it can be used in some really cool experiments, and was keen to give it a try.
Gallium is a liquid metal, similar to aluminium but it has a lower melting point making it easy to turn from a solid to a liquid and back again.
I order it yesterday and such is the nature of our past at the moment it arrived today. We’re still waiting for a few bits and bobs to arrive to make a Gallium fidget spinner but the boys were keen to give it a try. Luckily we had some Lego moulds so could get experimenting straight away.
To turn it into a liquid we added the tubes to a bowl of hot water from the tap.
Once the Gallium had changed state the boys poured it into our Lego moulds. We all agreed it looked incredible.
We pulled out our book on Elements and looked up Gallium. We discovered it’s in the Boron Group and are common in semiconductors.
We also talked about elements and how they can be combined to make compounds,
Atticus insisted he could draw the Gallium up in a syringe and pour it into water and it would stay together. I was skeptical but he was right.
It’s a warm day in Coffs so our moulds have not completely solidified yet so we’ll leave the end result to another post.