Excited to make gold nanoshells!
Success! Beautiful Gold nanoshells….really?
No…not really
They didn’t dry!!
Moral of the story…research is not an exact science. It takes failure and the capacity to reflect on errors made and move forward. I really appreciate scientists that have the courage to make mistakes and go back to the scientific method and start again. They are the true innovators! It’s time consuming, can be frustrating at times, but worth the effort. After going back through my procedures, I found out that I should have used 0.1% poly-l-lysine instead of the 0.01% poly-l-lysine. That helps the nanoshells stick to the quartz slides. Time to go start again!
Happy 4th of July to all! Have a safe and wonderful weekend 🙂
Thank you for making me spit out my drink….. Your project is defiantly trial and error. I love teaching my students through productive failure. Cant wait to see your amazing success!
Hey Julia!
This would be a great lesson to teach the students and the importance of significant figures and conversions. I myself was having trouble with pipettes at first due the conversions that need to be done from milliliters to microliter. Your experiment sounds awesome! Keep us posted on what happens with the new measurements.
That is beautiful, Julia. Failure does eventually lead us closer to the answer. That is something I try to remind my students. “Simple” mistakes will always have consequences – some small some large – and the decimal mistake, is a great example. But don’t worry, before my teaching career, I worked in the chemistry lab and accidentally used the wrong reagent to do a titration to determine the amount of fluoride in mouthwash! LOL This slight oversight was keeping pallets of mouthwash from moving out of a warehouse in the UK. Needless to say, I was fortunate to keep my position. 🙂
I love this! This looks like you are learning so much and it looks so fun! All the hands on learning and using the scientific method is really what I dreamed a scientist would really do. Plus, if you were not making mistakes, then you were really not learning anything at all. We learn more when we are frustrated than when everything is easy. Way to go!
I have learned several skills. All I need is to understand their application to my project and to integrate it with a lesson for my students. lol