Teranisha Vickens and Cedric Miller of Hazelwood East excel in ‘Battle of Burets’
In many battles, power and force are the keys to victory. During the Battle of the Burets, speed and accuracy are the decisive factors between winners and losers. Two Hazelwood East High School students took second place overall in the competition.
The Battle of the Burets is a contest for high school chemistry students, sponsored by the St. Louis section of the American Chemistry Society and the St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley. It matches teams from local high schools against each other in a test of titration, which is a common laboratory method of chemical or quantitative analysis which determines the concentration of a known reactant.
Each high school entered two-student teams, which competed in three preliminary heats, and the winner of each heat advanced to the championship round. Darrell Kyle, a chemistry teacher at Hazelwood East, entered students seniors Teranisha Vickens and Cedric Miller as one team and seniors Jennifer Huelsebusch and Marqueishia Carter as the other. All four students attend Kyle’s AP chemistry course.
Vickens and Miller took first place in their heat, and they ended up winning second place overall.
Each team received two 50 ml burets, ~150 mL of standardized sodium hydroxide, or lye, ~150mL of a hydrochloric acid solution, two clean funnels, phenolphthalein indicator solution, two clean 250 mL flasks, a wash bottle of deionized water, two 400 mL beakers and a score sheet. Students had to provide their own calculators and pens or pencils.
Before they began, teams rinsed their burets, and they learned the concentration of the titrating sodium hydroxide solution. With all glassware on lab benches and the buret stopcocks open, the judge started the timer and students filled their burets. The students had to transfer a measured amount (between 25 and 30 mLs) of the acid from the buret to the flask. Reaching the endpoint, they calculated the molarity (concentration) of the acid.
“Students must have the necessary equations committed to memory,” Kyle said. “Their final answer should be circled and the answer handed to the judge.”
“It looks easy, but it’s actually very difficult,” Vickens said. “If you put in a drop or half of a drop too much, it’s ruined.”
“Once you understand what you’re doing, like with anything else, it becomes simple,” Miller said.
“I was exceedingly impressed with my students,” Kyle said.
“This was the first time I had ever been to a titration tournament. My students were elated to be a part of the competition. The competition gave students a chance to meet students from other schools and to see what other schools do academically.”
Seventeen teams competed in the contest, including those from Trinity Catholic High School, Kirkwood, Clayton, Parkway West and St. Charles West High Schools.