[Catalist] Nanotechnology support for year 11 - colloidal gold

[Leon Harris]

Greetings to one and all. Hope you have had a restful holiday.
One weakness of the Nanotechnology section of Year 11 Chemistry is that 
it is very weak on lab components.
To help support this aspect of the course, I have designed and 
researched a cheap practical demonstrating colloidal gold and some of 
its properties. There is a nice canned prelab of calculations, and the 
whole thing should take 25 to 30 minutes of class time to perform (10 
minutes to complete the doing part of the actual experiment). The key 
advantage of this lab is that I have found a cheap source of reagents 
for it, and the reagent cost per class group to perform is something 
like $1.60 to $2. I was proud of that. It is robust, works great in my 
shed, and a rich learning experience (the colours are divine)!

If you would like a copy of this, please email me off list. (It is 
against policy to send attachments, I'm afraid, and I don't want to 
unintentionally annoy any non-chemists on our list.

Cheers,
Leon