Science News

Crystal Growing Competition

Science Club students have been working hard over the last few weeks to grow beautiful “diamonds”.

Unfortunately, these “diamonds” are actually composed on potassium aluminium sulfate rather than carbon, but they look pretty close! These crystals will be entered into the NSW RACI Crystal Growing Competition.

The process is a slow one (though luckily not billions of years like real diamonds!), and it has taken much dedication and a number of sessions to grow our crystals to a good size and shape.

We started with very small seed crystals which we tied to thin fishing line and left in a saturated solution of potash alum. We let the solution evaporate (concentrating the solution further) and left the beakers undisturbed, in the hopes of growing very clear and sharp crystals. Each week we’ve reset the potash alum solution and the growing crystal, in hopes of increasing the crystal size. Students with the best crystal growth each week have won prizes. We’ve had some great results and lots of fun!

Mia Sharma
Science Teacher