This lab was part of the materials science portion of my second-year inorganic chemistry course. Students synthesize a zeolite structure and grow a chemical garden as examples of silicate chemistry.

I paired this lab with several prelab exercises that included visualizing the zeolite structure (see related activities), reading a current literature article related to an active research collaboration at the school, and writing a step-by-step procedure from the literature methods section to gain practice in planning out experiments (and to appreciate the differences between lab manul procedures and a formal methods section). For simplicity, these prelab components have been eliminated from the VIPEr version of the lab, but the experiment could easily be expanded to include prelab activities that match your own research and departmental interests.

We saved the students' zeolites and attempted to use them as catalysts for the aquation of hexammine cobalt (III) complexes in a later lab experiment, but the analysis was complicated by students using inconsistent quantities of material and by residual base from the zeolite synthesis, which affected the pH of the later reaction. Since zeolite surfaces are expected to be catalytic, this might be an interesting avenue to explore in a more advanced class or with stricter experimental controls.