Midland College Chemistry Club organized the NCW celebrations with ACS Permian basin local section. Dr. Pat Nandakumar is the NCW coordinator and chem club members Megan Ennis, Zachary Hunter, Brandon Sanchez, Charity Anderson, Sikemi Esan, Jadzia Espinoza, Brian Weeks and Austin Jones took active part in doing demos and hands – on activities. Charity Anderson and Brian Weeks did the fruit juice sleuth hands-on activity. The kids had experience in adding detergent and making observations regarding color change and pH. Megan Ennis did a wonderful job of separating DNA from strawberries. This one activity piqued interest of the public a lot since they haven’t seen a DNA before. She is the show stealer, dressed in chemistry glassware and molecules dress, wearing dopamine earrings and necklace!  Sikemi Esan and Jadzia Espinoza are involved in explaining magic sand (non-wetting) and doing invisible ink experiment. The community learnt about few mysteries and how chemistry helped them to solve those! Brandon Sanchez lifted finger prints and he had a blast with it, exploring as he went and improvising the experiment, so that it was repeatable for a long time! Zachary Hunter did “Guess the element” show, helping public to identify sodium, copper, phosphorous, aluminum and zinc elements.  Austin Jones took care of our dry ice station, which is always a fun way to attract the community. He set up a hot plate with stirrer and created a “mini tornado”! He explained what dry ice is and did some demos by adding dry ice in water with few soap drop to show how soap bubbles fill up with CO2 and look cloudy! Overall, our NCW celebrations this year was a huge success and students and community had experienced a lot of fun with safe chemistry! We also participated in "Si, MC", an on campus event geared toward recruiting first-generation Latino students, visited local elementary schools, and helped conduct Science Extravaganza, a MC event for local 6th graders, performing demonstrations at each, and providing information regarding chemistry at MC. Our chapter attended ACS National meeting in San Diego and presented a poster in successful student chapter presentation. We hosted “Mini-Friday talks” to enhance our membership and retaining our members. The series has been a successful event with various professors and students presenting talks on different interesting topics such as “18 Phases of Ice”, “Explosions of hover boards”, and “handbook of poison”.

Club activities and community outreach by ACS student chapter of Midland College

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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