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  • Our STEM projects are designed so that participants get it wrong before they get it right. You will observe your students struggling as they attempt to create their own STEM projects. This process is an empowering experience, building perseverance, frustration tolerance and growing overall confidence! With your support, students will step out of their comfort zones to think, build and problem-solve for themselves.
  • Productive Struggle Skills
    - Drawing on fragile coffee-filter material without ripping
    -Using a pipette

In this Rosie Labs guide you will find:

  • Productive struggle opportunities for students during their project build,
  • Lesson objectives and concept overview,
  • Optional STEM topic video to share with participants,
  • Step-by-step instructions and video of the Rosie Riveters’ Chromatography Butterflies Project,
  • Optional STEM activities to further explore the objectives and concepts used in the project build.

Objective

Participants will learn the basic principles of chromatography and practice their color theory by forming a hypothesis of what colors make up their markers!

Concept Overview and Experiment Inspiration

Have you ever spilled a drop of water on a piece of paper? What happens to the ink on the page as the water begins to spread? You may notice that the ink doesn’t always smudge or blur as you expect. Instead, the ink often separates into different colored streaks that move across the page. What you’re seeing here is something known as chromatography.

Chromatography is the separation of parts from a whole. Everything in the world is made up of teeny tiny molecules (stuff) and ink is no exception. You can think of this like a bag of groceries you’re taking home from the grocery store; you can walk a lot farther with a light bag of groceries than you can with a heavy bag of groceries!

Scientists use chromatography to separate or split up mixtures (a combination of a bunch of things) into their individual components (things) so that they can study those components more closely. For our Butterflies, we have to separate the molecules of our marker ink by passing them through a solution (water) and then push them through some type of medium (in our case a coffee filter). The molecules of each color that make up black have different masses (you can think of this like weight). The molecules with a lower mass (less weight) can move farther through the coffee filter than the ones with a higher mass (heavier or more weight). Looking at things up close helps us understand how the world works!

Science Goals

  • Matter is all the “stuff” that exists in the universe. It has both mass and volume.
  • Mass is a measure of the amount of matter in an object. The higher the mass of an object in a given space, the higher it’s density.
  • Chromatography is the science of separating molecules so that scientists can understand different types of matter better.

Vocabulary

  • Chromatography – the technique of separating mixtures
  • Matter – Anything in the physical world that occupies space and has mass
  • Mass – a measure of the amount of matter in an object

Required Materials

  • markers
  • coffee filter
  • small cup
  • pen, pencil, or other writing tools
  • pipette
  • pipe cleaners
  • water

Step-By-Step Instructions

Step 1

Choose one marker to experiment with first. (Hint: black and brown are the most exciting!)

Step 2

Take one coffee filter. Draw a circle around the center of the coffee filter where the ridged part meets the flat center.

Step 3

Fill the pipette with water. To do this place the pipette into water while squeezing the bulb at the top. When the end of the pipette is submerged in water release your grip on the bulb to let it fill with water. Place several drops of water into the center of the coffee filter (enough to make the paper really wet). Let it sit while water flows up the paper.

Step 4

After the water has reached the outer edge, place the coffee filter on a newspaper to dry.

Step 5

Once the coffee filters are dry, scrunch them up in the middle and wrap a black pipe cleaner around the center with the ends styled to look like antennae!

Optional STEM Activities

Resource 1

After doing the Chromatography Butterflies, talk about what the students noticed in that experiment. How did the coffee filter work? Some mediums for experiments work better than others! Let’s explore why we chose coffee filters for our butterflies.

Give each student a piece of paper towel, a piece of cardboard and a regular piece of white paper.

Have them draw a thick line of marker color on each material.

Ask the students what their hypothesis is for what will happen to each material after adding water. A hypothesis is a guess about what they think will happen.

Using a pipette, have students place a few droplets of water onto the “ink” color lines of each material and observe what happens.

If a scientist is looking to split up their mixture (or ink) which material would work the best? Try other materials!