Women in Chemistry; making the difference – is a new venture that is being run by female researchers at Oxford, Warwick, Bristol, Wolverhampton, Durham Universities and Imperial College London. Each of the Universities hosts the event for a month and sets a challenge activity and hosts various question and answer sessions for 10-13 year old girls to ask questions and find out more about what the researchers are doing at their Universities and how to get into or involved in chemistry generally. During February Oxford University hosted the challenge called ‘Power Up’ which involved building a battery from household materials! Catherine took this challenge on and has written the following about her experience:
Power up challenge
Once I had all the equipment ready, I started to stack cells together to make the battery a 1p coin, followed by kitchen paper disc soaked in the salt and vinegar mixture and then the metal disc, which I repeated twenty times. I also had to make sure that each layer only touched the layer directly above or below. Then came the exciting part when I tested for a current by connecting wires to each end of my battery and a light bulb. Unfortunately, the light bulb didn’t glow, however, when we connected each end to a multimeter it did show that a current was flowing through my battery just wasn’t strong enough to light the bulb.