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Chemistry Students Have Gone Nuts!

Lab focuses on calorie content

Walsh

Allie closely monitors the temperature changes as the nut burns below.

 

Which nut has more calories:  roasted peanuts or roasted walnuts?  The chemistry students were recently asked this same question and completed a lab to find out.  Using a homemade calorimeter setup, the lab partners lit a nut on fire and observed how much energy was released.  They did this by finding the temperature change of the water in the flask above.  They did three trials for each nut to get a sufficient sample size.  By the end of the class period, the lab was full of floating carbon pieces and burnt nut smell! 

 

Walsh

Matt monitoring the set-up while Andrew records data.
The students will now calculate, per gram, how many calories the nuts held (since the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 g of water 1º Celsius).  They can then compare their results to the nuts’ product label to check for accuracy.  The students must take into consideration that product labels use the nutritional term “Calorie” (with a capital ‘C’).  A Calorie is equal to 1000 calories (scientific unit) or 1 kilocalorie.

Walsh

Students had to figure out the trick to lighting the fires!

After all the calculations have been completed, students will be able to decide, from their tests, which nuts have more calories—peanuts or walnuts!

Which nut do you think has more calories?

Donna Uhrenholdtdju0453@yahoo.comElginFarming, nursing

Oct 02, 2007

As far as the nut question, I have no idea... Just wanted to give you a GRAND "thumbs up" for all the experimentation being done in all science classes you teach Sara, these are memory-producing moments for all students involved, esp. those w/interest in sciences. I remember a lot of these things back in my Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry classes. Donna