DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! Unless you’re under the instruction of Roanoke Catholic chemistry teacher Sara Plante.
Last week, Ms. Plante introduced her 10th and 11th grade students to the chemistry lab and tasked them with calculating the temperature of a bunsen burner.
Sound simple? Not quite. You can’t just tell the burner to say ahh and pop a thermometer under its tongue. The thermometer would melt.
Instead, as she explains in this video, you have to use the burner to heat metal, drop the metal in water, measure the temperature change of the water, then use a bunch of formulas that use symbols like q and ΔT to determine the burner’s temp.