Please note that this post contains affiliate links and any sales made through such links will reward MageeNews.com a small commission – at no extra cost to you.
SCTC FEATURES ITS POLYMER SCIENCE PROGRAM!
Contributing Author: Joe Ann Floyd
Mrs. Crystal Smith’s Polymer II science students, at the Simpson County Technical Center, experimented with glass and a Bunsen burner as part of their curriculum on learning about chemical and physical changes. Glass is a bit of a riddle. It’s hard enough to protect us, but it shatters with incredible ease. It’s made from opaque sand, yet it’s completely transparent. And, perhaps most surprisingly of all, it behaves like a solid material… but it’s also a sort of weird liquid in disguise! You can find glass wherever you look: most rooms in your home will have a glass window and, if not that, perhaps a glass mirror… or a glass lightbulb. Glass is one of the world’s oldest and most versatile human-created materials. Glass blowing is a glass forming technique that humans have used to shape glass since the 1st century B.C. The technique consists of inflating molten glass with a blowpipe to form a sort of glass bubble, that can be molded into glassware for practical or artistic purposes. Thanks to the glass blowing process, glass has been one of the most useful materials in human society for centuries. Students learned the process, step by step, to give them a better understanding of how exactly engineers, chemists, artists and other professions have made the best use of this wonderful material. In this hands-on experiment students bent glass using a Bunsen burner and learned that glass is an amorphous solid as it’s made up mixture of materials in such a way that it does not crystallize.
Pictured is William Poole, Dallas Myers, Paxton Fortenberry, Meagan McClendon & Jonathan Ward
