indiE

What a week! I really enjoyed strolling into school at 9.30am. Sleeping 2 hours more everyday is simply blissful. The security guard must have thought I was late and stopped me. I simple said IP and like a magic word, he waved me in.

For chemistry and maths, we had to come up with a home rebonding kit.

With such a special task on hand, I certainly saw the school in a different light. For example, as we needed hair samples to try straightening, I went Long hair alert every time we saw students with long wavy hair in school. Also, my group went around the canteen searching for limes as they have a low pH. The drink store auntie gave us 10 limes FOC. If my group members hadnt mentioned, I would never have remembered how there is always half a lime on honeydew sago, instead I think I would have stolen limes from the Malay store!

The S and T centre was like a kitchen as well as a playground. We had access to all kinds of chemicals. With the project as an excuse, we did all kinds of unimaginable stuff like melting chocolate in a beaker and sticking in a pH paper to test for pH. We mixed egg white with sodium hydroxide and shampoo. The alkaline probably denatured the protein (my guess) and the egg white turned jelly-like. We also came up with this disgusting mixture of sodium hydroxide and banana. Somehow, the yellow mixture turned dark brown and watery. Wonder how Mdm Samsiah could tolerate 8 groups doing similar or even more creative experiments in the S and T lab.

By the way, never add sodium hydroxide (2m) to hair. Our hair sample dissolved in it; from strands of curly hair to a beaker of soggy black bee hoon that broke at the touch.

As hair is made of protein, we figured adding protein to it would strengthen it. We also needed an acid to neutralise our alkali. Thus, we had the brilliant idea of using sour milk. We bought HL milk and attempted to make it spoil, like by putting it in 4 different petri dishes and laying it out on the grass patch behind the staff room under the sun.

High acidity and alkalinity would harm ones scalp and so normally petroleum cream is apply on the head before hair rebonding. I linked this to the concept of mucus in the stomach protecting the stomach bag from the acid, and crazy ideas developed like replacing petroleum cream with goo from lady s finger, aloe vera or even durians.

Although there is no timetable to follow during this week and the project didn’t really demand a lot of time, poor time management and being rather off track in our experimental procedure led to finishing up in school at 7pm almost everyday and meeting online late at night to hold further discussions. However, as we did everything by ourselves and the teachers were solely facilitators, the time spent was rather relaxing.

Everyone agreed that we would have worked harder if we knew what the prize was- 10 movie tickets! But that would truly dilute the true meaning of indiE-venture week wouldnt it?

Anyway, I would say that indiE-venture week was a success and I really enjoyed myself. I learnt more about acids, alkalis and the effect that they had on hair and had fun albeit through mistakes like dissolving hair samples. =D