Ooze Labs: Colorful Crystal Lab

Explore the natural beauty and wonder of crystals by growing them yourself in many different shapes and colors. Set up your lab base station, the headquarters for all your crystal growing experiments, complete with beakers, test tubes, petri dish, tweezers, centrifuge, display dome, and more. Then conduct more than ten experiments in crystal formation, using safe, non-toxic crystal salts. Make a crystal volcano by growing fast-forming crystals on a paper cone. Watch long spindly crystals form on a rock as if from nowhere. Grow crystals in many different ways, such as in a petri dish by evaporation, on a string dangling in solution, and by cooling a supersaturated solution. Experiment with three different chemicals, each resulting in different crystal shapes: monopotassium phosphate, ammonium dihydrogen phosphate, and potassium aluminium sulfate. Mix your own colors for your crystal growing solutions in the spinning centrifuge, so you can achieve a variety of different colors: red, pink, blue, purple, and clear. Learn about how crystals form in your experimental solutions and also in nature.