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Hi, I'm Tom Loschiavo, Chemistry Education Manager at PASCO scientific.
I'm here today to talk about glow sticks.
Glow sticks come in a variety of shapes and sizes
and are very popular, especially at this time of year.
They also involve a good bit of chemistry.
Glow sticks are an example of a chemiluminescent process.
That means the reactants react to produce an energy in the form of light.
We're going to study that light using our Light Level Sensor.
The way the glow stick works is there are two separate containers.
When you break it, the container containing the hydrogen peroxide
mixes with the container containing the phenyl oxalate ester and florescent dye
and you get this nice glowing stick.
To study that using our Light Level Sensor, we're going to do that in a darkened vessel.
We're going to use SPARKvue.
I'm going to set up SPARKvue to show the light level on a graph.
To do this, I want to separate the reactants.
So I took a glow stick and I cut the top off.
Pardon me while I change into some safer goggles.
I cut the top off and I'm going to pour one of the reactants into the beaker.
And then I'm going to break the vial and pour the other reactant in.
Now I'm going to make sure they're nice and mixed.
I will put them in my vessel,
line up my light sensor,
and start data collection.
I'm going to autoscale the graph.
Even though your eyes don't detect it,
you can see immediately that the light level is decreasing over time.
This actually provides a great opportunity for inquiry with your students.
You can have them try to figure out how to make the light brighter,
how to make it last longer, how to make it go faster,
see what temperature effects would do to all of those things.
But there's a good bit of chemistry to be had with these fun little toys around this time of year.
If you want to learn more about this process you can check out the PASCO blog.
If you have any questions feel free to contact me at chemistry@pasco.com.
Have a safe and happy Halloween. Thank you.