Maybe you had one as a kid. Smithsonian has a nostalgia article.But I want to talk about a new thing: A Clever New Chemistry Kit Your Kid Will Actually Want to Use | Science | WIRED Not now available for purchase but probably soon. This is exciting for being open ended in terms of possibilities. Also because scale matters. Your Gilbert chem set (and 19th century science) worked at centimeter scales. This approach goes down in scale, as more recent 'formal' chemistry and biochemistry have done. You still need a sensible color change in a 'dot', but that speaks to your iphone camera and Pantone charts (which are the next thing in need of open sourcing ) They may have forgotten to copyright their RGB (CNY) pixels value (Gawd I am really divulging too much here) The citizen science potential looks huge. They had me at 'soil', but I see fertility not toxins. Science in 'the west' is done with expensive machines, and expanding it (obviously needed) elsewhere requires cost reduction. Here ya go. Especially I liked "...show them how much is not known...". Uncertainty does not kill us; it shows that we are alive. I may need an internet vent other than PC for this. Not your problem...
I had one as a kid. Pretty good one too. Got bored with the canned experiments and decided to mix just about every chemical the kit had in a tube over the Bunsen burner ran the goo through flexible tube which collapsed halfway through the heating and caused pressure build up in the tube which promptly blew the cork and pasted my bedroom ceiling. Fearing repercussions from my mother I promptly used Comet cleaner. Hmm, well lets just say that area of my room glowed like phosphorescences for many, many years.
I had Gilbert set 50 years, ago. But I had the most fun staying back after school with my 8th grade science teacher. We did a lot of experiments, since we had the run of the entire lab. Some of the stuff we used are considered explosives and hazardous materials, today, and are allowed only for use only with a special permit.
