Many labs that I do I don’t need to try. I teach middle school so most of the lab activities do not involve chemicals or anything too in depth. We do the paper airplane lab to work with the scientific method, the gummy bear osmosis lab and others alike, BUT this time I wanted to try something new! I wanted to find a cellular respiration lab. So I searched and searched and found one using Bromothymol Blue solution. Basically the bromothymol turns from blue to green in the presence of carbon dioxide. Seems prefect until I realize we don’t have any bromothymol blue. I walked into the equipment room and found a universal indicator. Remind you, I teach middle school so all those indicators I am not too familiar with. Well I tried it anyways. Basically when the universal indicator is in a basic or neutral solution it will be blue… hence the name, but once CO2 is added it will turn acidic and turn yellow… So I experimented in the equipment room. I am having my advanced students do this lab just standing and then again after 1 minute of jumping jacks.
See the video and tell me what you think!