In December 2020, OT4 embarked on an ambitious project to gather exciting ideas from the budding young scientists in our Rafflesian community. While our physical Einstein sessions have yet to resume due to COVID-19 restrictions, we are using this period to redesign and revise our curriculum.
As some of you who regularly follow this blog may know, many of us now believe that it is highly unlikely we will be allowed to formally resume in-person Einstein sessions by the end of this year.
So like many other education providers and online courses, we're now working hard to pivot towards modular online sessions.
But because of the hands-on nature of our activities and curriculum structure, one big issue is that many of our beneficiaries may not have the necessary resources to carry out our activities and learn from them.
With everyone finding themselves now with too much time but too little things to do, we reached out to partner with our school community to curate an idea bank of exciting experiments that can be packed into low-cost activity crates for our beneficiaries.
Even if physical sessions resume, these ideas and Einstein-in-a-box can be used as extensions for interested students to continue learning outside The Einstein Lab in their free time at home.
Structure of Idea Bank Initiative
The idea bank initiative was split into two rotations of two weeks each to allow our peers to make it more convenient for our peers to contribute.
They could either sign up individually or in small groups to curate experiments that used easily available household materials and are suitable for our target beneficiaries aged between 10 and 12.
We're pleased to announce that both rotations were astounding successes as seen from the stats below:
Rotation 1: 17 Groups | 36 Participants | 27 Experiments
Rotation 2: 20 Groups | 52 Participants | 33 Experiments
Over the next few weeks, we plan to highlight the most promising ideas from this idea bank initiative that we'll be looking to pack into activity crates for our beneficiaries.
This week, we'll introduce a nutrition experiment titled Popeye the Sailor Man by Glenda!
Reap What You Sow | Popeye the Sailor Man
Section 1: Resources
Food Materials:
2 stalks of Spinach
2 stalks of Asparagus
¼ bunch of Grapes
1 piece of banana
4 tea bags
Equipment:
1 small knife
1 chopping board
2 cups of tap water
1 cup of hot water
4 disposable cups
4 pieces of paper towel
Stove
Electronic weighing scale
Recording sheet (to tabulate results)
Section 2: Procedure
Step 1: Using a small knife and a chopping board, chop 4 cups of the 4 types of fruits and vegetables.
Step 2: Using a mortar and pestle, blend the contents in each cup with ½ cup of water until they are pureed. Alternatively, use a small knife to dice the fruits and squash the pieces using the side of the knife or a spoon.
Step 3: Using a paper towel, strain the solutions in each cup to remove the pulp and collect the liquid in a separate transparent cup.
Step 4: Prepare tea by soaking 4 tea bags in hot water and allow the tea to brew for 10 minutes.
Step 5: Add the tea to the juice solution slowly while stirring, which will chemically react and cause the iron to precipitate at the bottom of the cups as black solids.
Step 6: With a stove, heat the solutions for 15 minutes, then strain the juice solutions once again to collect the iron precipitates.
Step 7: Place the iron solids onto a paper towel, and gently pat dry the solids with a tissue
Step 8: Weigh the iron solids on an electronic weighing scale. Make sure to account for the mass of the filter paper by using the TARE method. Record their respective weights in an appropriate table.
Step 9: Repeat steps 2 to 8 two more times and calculate the average weight of the iron from the 3 repeated experiments. This ensures reliability of results to improve the accuracy of the experiment.
Section 3: Explanation
Hello everyone! Do you enjoy your greens? Have you ever wondered why your mom and dad always insists that you finish up those vegetables, and fruits too? Well, let’s ask Popeye the sailor man! You know what, besides the famous spinach, there are also a bunch of other foods rich in iron!
Oh no, isn’t iron a type of metal? How can food contain iron? Does that mean that we are eating stuff we should not be? Actually, that is perfectly safe, and in fact this type of iron, which is different from the kinds you see in buildings, is extremely healthy for our body!
This is especially the case for patients with IRON DEFICIENCY. Does anyone recognize this term? It's a medical condition caused by too little iron!
Isn't it natural to not have metals in our bodies? Ironically, it is the opposite! In fact, ANEMIA occurs when the body does not have enough red blood cells that carries this very iron.
On the one hand, certain foods can help the body to absorb iron, while on the other hand, others can block this process and make it worse. Let's explore the types of fruits and vegetables that we eat, that helps to boost our iron content!
100g of raw spinach contain 2.7 mg of iron (15% of our recommended daily intake)
100g of asparagus contains 2 mg of iron (12% of our recommended daily intake)
100g of banana contains 4 mg of iron
Are you curious to know more about foods that do the opposite by interfering with iron absorption?
Tea and coffee
foods that contain tannins, such as grapes (0.3mg per 100g) and corn
foods rich in gluten, such as pasta and other products (made with wheat, barley, rye, or oats)
The Use of Tea
Interesting, isn’t it? Aren’t you curious how to check the amount of iron in the food you eat everyday? Should we use a magnet to do so? Haha, today, we will be using tea to help us! Strange, isn’t it? Why is a drink being used to find a type of metal?
You see, tea is pretty unique. It is a type of plant, so it contains a special substance called TANNINS. TANNINS likes iron, so it combines with iron in this process called CHELATION to form black solids. Just like how CHE-LA-TION is a long name, so is the process!
The Importance of Heat
In fact, if we are to leave the solutions alone for the reaction to proceed, we will need a long time up to 3 hours! So, we decided to use heat to help us shorten the duration and make it more speedy! Do you know why?
Just like how you sway slowly from side to side when listening to gentle music but jiggle about when listening to fast loud music, these particles also jiggle about really fast when heated, which means that the reaction will speed up too.
Can you guess what these black solids are? Right, these are the substances that contain iron! So we can then collect these solids and weigh it to find out the amount of iron in the food you eat. That’s pretty straightforward, right?
Comparing Iron Content of Different Foods
So let's help Popeye compare the different amounts of iron in 2 different types of vegetables and 2 different types of fruits to see which ones have the highest/lowest iron content!
After all, spinach might not be the one with the most iron! Let us use your own individual results to compare with the amount that we talked about at the start! (~mg/g under list of health benefits). Do they match?
Section 4: Extension
Reliability vs Accuracy
The TARE Method
Magnetic Cereal & Ferrofluids
During the circuit breaker last year, Science Centre Singapore introduced a video series on #stayathomescience cringely titled "Science O'Clock". Each episode is typically less than 5 minutes long, and are available for viewing on both Facebook and YouTube.
One of the more interesting episodes is titled Magnetic Cereal, with the tagline: "You don't have to be Iron Man or Magneto to test this out!"
In the video above, the friendly neighborhood scientist decides to have a bowl of cereal to replenish her energy after an "intense" workout. But she notices that her packet of cereal apparently contains 16.2 mg of iron. So she follows a similar procedure to what we've done for Popeye the Sailor Man!
After mashing up her cereal with a hammer, adding some water, and then straining it into a bowl, the scientist does something very interesting.
She drops a strong magnet into the cereal mixture, stirs it around quickly, and fishes it out with bits of iron stuck onto the magnet.
This works because unlike foods such as spinach which naturally contain iron, the iron inside cereal is known as fortified iron. In other words, the iron bits are added to the cereal to make it more nutritious, which is why it can be easily attracted by and extracted with a strong magnet!
What are the implications of this? Well, if we have enough cereal and much stronger magnets, we can become like Magneto and manipulate the iron bits in our environment!
The trick is to add some vegetable oil to the small amount of iron bits such that it forms what's known as a ferrofluid. Check out the cool video below produced by The Action Lab!
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