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Sydney’s ‘future scientists’ get their first taste of chemistry at BASF Kids’ Lab
- Local Sydney primary students to take to the UNSW labs on November 9.
- Educational program highlights to children how chemistry plays a role in daily life.
Sydney, Australia – November 9, 2016 – Students from primary schools across the state will don their safety googles and head to the science labs at UNSW Australia (The University of New South Wales), School of Chemical Engineering in Kensington this week for the inaugural BASF Kids’ Lab program in Sydney.
Set to spark the imagination of young students through a variety of simple, yet awe inspiring science experiments, the program has been developed to encourage an interest in science from a young age.
Local primary schools Randwick Public School and Daceyville Public School are participating in the one-day program which includes experiments like:
Heat sensitive worms – Kids partake in an experiment introducing an alginate gel (the ‘worm’) to a thermochromic dye that changes colour in response to a change in temperature.
Slime – Always one of the favourites, kids get to learn how to make slime! The learning from this experiment comes from understanding how chemicals react together to form new compounds and how chemistry has a fun application. The children take home their own sample of slime (maybe not such a favourite of the parents!)
Paper chromatography – Kids observe the make-up of certain colours and experience what happens when they are separated using a chromatographic process.
The program, an initiative of global chemical company BASF and locally organised in partnership with UNSW, will give primary school children a hands-on experience conducting safe, colourful chemistry experiments, under the supervision of a team of scientists.
BASF Australia and New Zealand’s Chairman and Managing Director, David Hawkins, said the program opens kids’ minds to science in an exciting, but controlled and safe environment.
“There’s such an element of wonder to science and creating chemistry, we designed the program to get kids interested in science with a really basic understanding of how things work,” Mr Hawkins said.
“We hope that the Kids’ Lab experience will ignite a passion in science and chemistry that could one day see them working in a company like BASF.”
Already rolled out in other states around Australia, BASF Kids’ Lab is a fun and educational way of showing kids how exciting chemistry can be.
About BASF in Australia and New Zealand
BASF posted sales of about €428 million in Australia and New Zealand in 2015, serving key industries in the agriculture, coatings, construction, manufacturing and mining sectors. As of the end of 2015, the company had 442 employees and operated 11 production sites across the sub-region, manufacturing agricultural solutions, performance products and functional materials & solutions. BASF has been active in Australia for more than 90 years, and for about 60 years in New Zealand. Further information is available on the Internet at www.basf.com/au.
About BASF
At BASF, we create chemistry for a sustainable future. We combine economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility. The approximately 112,000 employees in the BASF Group work on contributing to the success of our customers in nearly all sectors and almost every country in the world. Our portfolio is organized into five segments: Chemicals, Performance Products, Functional Materials & Solutions, Agricultural Solutions and Oil & Gas. BASF generated sales of more than €70 billion in 2015. BASF shares are traded on the stock exchanges in Frankfurt (BAS), London (BFA) and Zurich (AN). Further information at www.basf.com.
