Smith ties up end of the year with tie-dye activity
Usually done at the end of the school year, chemistry teacher Suzanne Smith works with the current semester chemistry classes in a tie-dye project. With this being the seventh or eighth year, the second semester class this year was able to do this project, rather than the first semester due to no dye being available at the time. Classes in previous years have used store-bought dye, but this year, Smith decided to go down a different route.
“This year since we found a lab where we can make indigo, we thought it’d be cool to first do that and then actually use the indigo dye [to dye shirts],” Smith said.
While the activity is a hands-on time for students to step away from the textbooks and powerpoints, Smith made sure that her students were aware of the science behind the dye.
“There is a lot of chemistry involved with indigo tie-dye, that’s why I like it more. It’s the sizing of the chemical, the calculating of percent yield, we can talk about oxidation reductions. There’s a lot of neat chemistry going on and it ‘ties’ the whole year together,” Smith said.
