International Year of Chemistry The Global Water Experiment

The Global Experiment consists of four experiments. It is expected that most teachers will work with their classes to carry out the four activities, which have explicit instructions and background materials. These will be helpful for teachers who do not have science backgrounds.

The activities cover important topics and conceptual understanding in science and also provide a variety of opportunities to learn important experimental and data gathering skills. The data obtained from the experiments can then be uploaded to this website to contribute to the global data collection.

Alternatively, teachers can select to undertake a single activity if they want their students to collect some data and contribute to the Global Experiment without using the other activities, perhaps because water is studied at a different year level. If, on the other hand, an existing curriculum unit studying water is part of the curriculum during 2011, appropriate parts of the Global Experiment activities can be added selectively to the existing curriculum and give students the chance to participate in the experiment.

In this activity students will be learning about acidity, one of the most common chemical properties encountered around the home. At the same time they will be learning good experimental techniques to test the reliability of their results. Read More

This activity will give students the opportunity to use either a homemade or commercial meter to measure the conductivity of water samples. Students will learn about salts and determine concentrations of salts in solutions. Read More

In this activity students will use household materials to build a water filtration unit and identify the efficiency of different filtration materials. Then, as a follow up, they will carry out a treatment of the water. Read More

In this activity students will explore an alternative way of purifying water using a solar still, learning about the distillation process and the states of matter. The activity will provide students with the opportunity to design and build their own more efficient stills. Read More

The activities of the Global Water Experiment are designed to be undertaken with equipment and materials commonly available in a school laboratory. However if preferred, a kit especially designed for carrying out the activities in the Global Water Experiment can be purchased from the Radmaste Centre at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa: http://www.radmaste.org.za/. Adapted experimental protocols have been developed for these kits to ensure consistency with the Global Water experiment.

The kit is supplied as a school resource with the common equipment and materials to perform the experiments and ten individual sets of equipment for student use (which can also be ordered individually). The price of the kit is about $US165 and does not include postage and packaging. The order form and the up-to-date prices can be found at:
http://www.radmaste.org.za/docs/RADMASTEorderform.pdf

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