When you ask someone to imagine what chemistry looks like, they may immediately picture vibrant liquids in glassware, white lab coats, and safety goggles. While this scene can describe part of the research experience for many chemists, others use computer simulations to gain insight into chemical processes. To share the theoretical side of chemistry with the next generation of scientists and engineers, the McDaniel lab in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry facilitated interactive demonstrations at this year’s Middle Grades Discover Georgia Tech outreach event.

The Middle Grades Discover Georgia Tech event is hosted by the Office of Institute Relations and sees roughly 250–300 local 5th – 8th grade students visit campus to participate in STEM demonstrations. The activities are planned and facilitated by researchers from the various departments of GT as well as GTRI and include using functional paper microscopes, building roller coasters from household materials, and simulating centrifugation with beads suspended in water. This is the second year which has also seen demonstrations of theoretical and computational chemistry by the McDaniel lab.

Building off their activities from the previous year, McDaniel lab members John Hymel, John Pederson, Chloe Renfroe, and Chengyuan Shao devised four interactive stations to demonstrate chemical principles. Station one involved spinning marbles on a turntable plate to simulate heat transfer by molecular collisions, and spinning the turntable at different speeds allowed the marbles to simulate the different phases of matter. The second station had students control the view in a rendering of a pre-computed molecular dynamics simulation of salt water. Station three had students explore the compounds that can be put together using the primary elements of organic chemistry (C, H, N, O, F, P, S, Cl, Br, and I) with a molecular modelling kit. The final station involved investigating differences in color and texture for different mineral and metal samples—demonstrating how crystal structure, impurities, and defects affect the properties of materials.

This year’s event took place on Wednesday, September 25th. In total, they were able to present their demonstration to nearly 80 students.