Chemistry Day outreach engages youth in science

For the sixth consecutive year, Associate Professor Christy Haynes and Department of Chemistry students will be conducting Chemistry Day at the West 7th Community Center in Saint Paul, Thursday, July 21.

This outreach includes an afternoon of activities for young people entering kindergarten through 9th grade participating in the community center's summer day camp. It will be an afternoon of chemistry demonstrations, hands-on experiments, and, new this year, a mystery that the older youth must use chemistry to solve.

The West 7th Community Center serves Saint Paul's diverse West 7th neighborhood, providing educational and recreational opportunities to residents.

Chemistry Day is one of the Department of Chemistry's outreach activities aimed at showing young people, particularly those from diverse or underprivileged populations, that chemistry is fun and something that they, too, can do.

One of the popular Chemistry Day experiments is making liquid nitrogen ice cream. This is a photo from the 2010 Chemistry Day.