Director's Cut: Trial 0

Director's Cut: Trial 0

Date: 4 July 2012

Time: 3pm-5pm
Room temperature: 27°C

Weather: Sunny 

I tried to conduct my (hoped) final experiment today in school and said hopes crashed, burned and ran off to find mummy. There won't be multiple posts of procedures/results/etc because I didn't even collect all the data.

1. There were supposed to be 28 GRBs, each and every one of a different size and shape made, measured, cooked and measured again. If possible, multiple duplicates, but that could come later. Of course it devolved into a mess.
2. I was using unfamiliar equipment in an unfamiliar lab. While the good lighting (which you can see from the photos) and the conveniently placed sink and work bench was much appreciated, unfamiliar is still disorienting.
3. Because I was using school property, there was a time limit and plenty of people watching. It doesn't sound like much, but I swear you get much more stressed about how your GRBs are doing when people are walking by asking if they could eat them.
4.  I got four phone calls, each striking just when I'd settled the last, washed my hands and picked up the dough again. So, very, popular.
5.    The hotplate at school took 40 minutes to boil the water, then it gave up and stayed at 80 °C the moment the GRB were introduced. So, first batch of results nigh unusable-but very attractive-to-fellow-experimenters-anyway-reminders of failure.
6. Thanks to Mr Ali and Mr Ooi, second batch was done on two bunsen burners, but then you had to scramble to keep the water at just the right temperature so that it was boiling, but not boiling over.

7. 

   Fire is hot.

8. 

   Fire is really hot. Also, not succeeding in the not boiling over

9. The electronic weighing scale in the lab was really really good. 0.01g good. Which of course means it took 10 seconds per reading, which was really not good when you had 28 lumps of wallpaper paste sticking to everything, and you have to adjust their weight by pinching off tiny flakes and waiting 10 seconds per flake. Or, watching as the cooked GRB steams on, completely unaware that it's reducing the accuracy of the reading by losing heat every second. Such joy.
10. Amidst this, few photos were taken, 18 GRB's measurements ruined, 1 after cooking volume not taken, and countless people scared. So, what to do better:

• Perhaps, if you know you're the impatient type and have been doing small scale trials all this while, why for the love of science are you doing 28 sets of finicky steps all at once? Split it up next time.
• Accept that that scale is never going to show you .00g and move on. .5g within the target is perfectly fine for everyone who's not you, .05g is a good compromise if you are you.
• Make sure that people actually know you're going to be elbow deep in flour, or shove that phone under the bed and have plausible deniability. 
• Be James Bond and reccee the lab first. Ask about the apparatus, get comfortable with the set-up, never do the final experiment/set off the big bomb where you have never tried before.
• Plan all of these (including a test batch of four GRB that never got used...) and actually follow them.

Big brother is watching... The dye is yellow, by the way.