The following teaching and learning resources are being utilised for a series of school outreach events in regional and rural Victoria, Australia. We wanted to offer this outreach event free to schools who often do not get these sorts of opportunities. For others, we have made all of our resources available on this site.
All of the resources have been made available using a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) for you to modify and use for schools to use for their own education purposes. We only ask that you provide appropriate credit to Elements of Sustainable Chemistry (ESC), Deakin University. All documents below are PDFs, but please email us if you would like a word document, we will gladly share.
Periodic Table of Sustainable Elements – 2019 visit resources
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📁 pdf
392 kB Activity booklet for students
Provided to student participants to record observations of all activities during the event -
📁 pdf
418 kB Activity booklet for student leaders
Provided to students who received pre-event training and supported students during the event
Periodic Table of Sustainable Elements – Resources, sorted by practical activity
Resources sorted by individual practical activity.
Experiment - Making an aluminium-air battery
Students make a working battery out of a piece of aluminium foil, some salt water, a piece of paper towel and some ground charcoal.
Experiment - Copper crystals grown on aluminium sheet
Students grow intricate branched copper crystals on the aluminium sheet sitting in copper ion containing agar.
Experiment - Turning Copper coins 'silver' and 'gold'
Students galvanise a coin with zinc to turn it ‘silver’, then heat it to turn the coin ‘gold’.
Experiment - Periodic Table sets and Gallium
Students interact with 33 elements from the periodic table, including gallium.
Experiment - Carbon rod writing
Students use a carbon rod attached to a power supply to ‘write’ brown iodine patterns onto a piece of paper.
Experiment - Iodine writing and fingerprints
Students ‘write’ with an iodine solution on filter paper, then ‘erase’ the writing with ascorbic acid.
Demo - Mini-thermite reaction
A popular demo, aluminium powder reacts violently with iron oxide powder in the thermite reaction.
Demo - Colourful bottles
Three colourful reactions; the Traffic light reaction, the Blue bottle reaction, and Cobalt blue to pink.