Crystals Lab

In my opinion, this is the funnest lab that we have done all year.  This lab was all about solutions and having the proper about of saturation into the solution. Basically it was a trial and error lab.  You had to find out that it was the best thing to just stuff as much of the Aluminum Potassium Sulfate in the water as it would hold.  This would produce crystals too fast, and would just glue them to the beaker and not be able to pull them out.  It was a patients lab, because the slower it produced crystals the more controlled it would grow them.  The first day we learned the hard way, and stuffed the powered into the water, until it could hold no more.  Like I said, this was the wrong thing to do.  When we got back the next day, the crystals were uncontrolled and just glued all over the beaker.  There was nothing that we could do but learn from our mistake and start over.  This time we used much less powder and didn't saturate the water the that extent.  The following day, we found out that our attempt was a success.  We had produced a very large crystal, that was very colorful and neat.  This experiment was like every other one in some ways.  It sometimes takes a screw up to realize that the direction you went was totally wrong, and that you need to just do it over.