Activities for Schools

associated with Crystal Growing Competitions

K.M.Crennell August 1998

Crystals take some time to grow, so while they are growing you may like to try some of these activities:

1. Jewels Colouring Competition
Click here to see a page of jewels, print the page and then you are ready for the following activities:

Colour in the 6 crystals, and then look in a book of minerals or jewellery to find out more about each jewel, for example:

• what is its chemical formula? what colour is it?
• how hard is it? which one is the hardest?
• which ones can be made in a laboratory? How is it done?
• where is it found naturally? How is it extracted?
• does it have any industrial uses? In addition to its use as jewellery.
• have there been any particularly famous specimens? Who owned them? Where are they now?
• the jewels are drawn as polyhedra, do any of them have special names?
• what else can you find out about these jewels? Write and tell us.

2. Make your own garnet

Cut out the plane shape of a garnet carefully, use glue or sticky tape to fix the tabs on to the opposite faces to make your own three dimensional model.
Try stacking up several models to see whether they make a completely solid block with no gaps between them. Can you think of any other shapes which can fill space in this way?

3. Crystals on postage stamps
Many people collect postage stamps, common themes are birds, animals, modes of transport, less common are minerals and crystals. Make a list of stamps related to crystals, including the country of issue, date, topic, etc . Here are some to start with.

Which country issued them?
When?
What crystals are they?
Why were they issued?

4. Make a list of Nobel prize winners associated with crystallography

What are Nobel prizes? Who awards them? For what achievements? How often? Make a list of those who have won prizes for work associated with crystals. There is no prize for crystallography, but prizes associated with other subjects, chemistry, physics and medicine, have been given for work on the structure of crystals.

5. Surf the Internet to look for sites associated with crystals

Try searching for other sites on the World Wide Web associated with crystals. Sites may have images of natural crystals, or you can learn how crystals are essential to many modern industrial products. Find out how a quartz watch works, how liquid crystals are used in some computing screens, and many other exciting things.


Please send comments on these activities or news of anything you find out, particularly the details of any stamps issued or Internet site URLs you find to the British Crystallographic Association, prefrably by email to the Webmaster at the address below.

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