Creating,+Imagining,+and+Innovating

Creating, Imagining, and Innovating
We recently learned about acids and bases, something I have always found fun. More specifically, I've always found testing a solution to see if its an acid or base extremely fun. It's always entertaining to add a single drop of indicator and see an entire solution change color. It seems childish, I know, but it helps when I'm interested in what I am learning.

For this experiment, we were given hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide solution. We placed some hydrochloric acid in a test tube, and we had to use that same amount and dilute it to six more concentrations. Then we did the same with the sodium hydroxide solution. We had numbered the test tubes and placed them in order. All we had to do was add a drop of Universal indicator to each test tube. We found this extremely entertaining as different shades of reds, oranges, blues, greens, and yellows appeared. Basically, what we made in test tube form was meant to mirror a typical pH color scale, and we were pretty accurate.

Except for one thing, we had a green solution at the right end of the scale. We were confused as to why this was (we were probably too mesmerized by the pretty colors), when we finally realized that we had to switch the thirteenth test tube with the eighth as the bases had to be done opposite to the hydrochloric acid. We switched the two and it worked out perfectly.

This experiment wasn't necessarily the hardest one ever, and it was more entertaining than anything. I thought it brought out a bit of our creative flair (by crafting a masterpiece of colors), and because of this, we stumbled upon a problem that we were able to fix, which showed us that we knew the pH scale very well to understand what we did wrong.