With Halloween essentially acting as the first stop on the fun countdown to Christmas, students will definitely enjoy some immersive STEAM activities with a light Halloween theme.
Merging STEAM with a popular holiday is a great way to provide students with an enjoyable insight into how STEAM learning can have many different career and experience pathways.
How can I relate STEAM to Halloween for my students?
Mixing science with spookiness might seem like a stretch, but it doesn’t have to be. Halloween is the ideal opportunity to explore the “mad scientist” stereotype, or get your students involved with icky activities that gross them out just the right amount.
Lesson plans related to STEAM for middle school students
A great approach is to use interactive activities as part of your lesson plan - and there’s a wide variety of options to choose from when it comes to STEAM lessons for middle school students.
Interactive, hands-on lessons, such as computer coding and building electronic circuits for specific purposes, can help your students understand difficult science concepts much better. These lessons can also be designed as team/group activities that will encourage students to cooperate and get creative.
Learning should be fun and must be grounded in practical applications. For example, you can have themes for your lessons, such as relating it to special occasions like Halloween. You can demonstrate various scientific concepts through exciting experiments that involve chemistry, physics, electronics, and coding.
Here, we’ve rounded up our four of our favorite spooky Halloween lessons for middle schoolers.
Halloween experiments for middle schoolers
Lesson 1: Salt Crystallization Experiment - Spooky Salt Crystal Shapes
Allowing your students to get creative while learning about salt crystallization, this exciting experiment shows what happens to salt molecules when water evaporates. For this experiment, you’ll need:
- Pipe cleaners
- Salt
- Mason jars
- String
- Pegs
The first step is to twist and shape your pipe cleaners into something spooky - this could be a spider, a pumpkin, a witch’s hat, or almost any other Halloween-themed item you can think of. You’ll then need to tie the string around the top of the shape so that it can be suspended in the mason jar without touching the sides. Use the peg to hold the string in place and lie it flat over the top of the jar.
You’ll then need to bring enough water to fill the jars to a boil, adding as much salt as you can mix in once it reaches boiling point. Pour the saltwater into the jars so that the shapes are completely submerged. After a few days of sitting in a sunny spot, your shapes will be covered in crystals.
Watch the experiment in action
Lesson 2: Cornstarch Goo Experiment - Glow-in-the-dark Goo
Nothing says “Halloween combined with science” quite like glow-in-the-dark goo. This fun and simple experiment is a great way to teach students how non-Newtonian fluids work, and serves as a great introduction to Newton’s law of viscosity.
It also demonstrates the natural fluorescence of quinine, due to the particles in it moving faster when exposed to light sources. For this, you’ll need:
- Cornstarch
- Tonic water (with quinine)
- Large plastic tray
- Blacklight torch
For this experiment, you simply mix two parts cornstarch and one part quinine into a tray, adding and subtracting cornstarch or quinine depending on whether the mixture feels too stiff or loose (this is a great problem-solving exercise, too!).
Once you’ve got the right ratio, simply take your tray into a dark room and shine the blacklight onto the glowing goo!
Lesson 3: Ghostly Chromatography Experiment
Not only does this experiment allow students to learn something STEAM-related, but it also gives them a Halloween decoration to take home with them.
Exploring how chemists use chromatography to separate the colors contained within different substances and materials, this exercise might encourage budding scientists to step forward.
To make these fun little chromatography ghosts you’ll need:
- Black marker pens
- Rubbing alcohol
- White coffee filters (or specialist chromatography paper)
- Pegs
- Mason jars
- Small pom poms
To begin this spooky experiment, flatten the coffee filter completely and draw several circles around the center, as if you’re drawing a target near the center of the filter - it’s important that you don’t go right to the center as this is the area that will come into contact with the rubbing alcohol.
Fold the circle into a triangle or filter shape with the center pointing down. Suspend this into a mason jar that is about hall full with rubbing alcohol. Let the tip of the coffee filter touch the alcohol and secure it with a peg if needed and leave them like this for 24 hours.
When you come back to the filters, there should be plenty of pretty colors that have separated out across the filter. Take the filter out of the liquid, push a pom pom up underneath the center and twist it around so that you have a ‘head’ and ‘body’ of a floating ghost. You can then draw on a creepy face and enjoy your chromatography ghost decoration.
Lesson 4: The scary Arduino pumpkin
Of course, if you have an Arduino kit or components, you can create your own Halloween lesson and bring your creations to life. We love this scary pumpkin, a project created by a member of the Arduino community.
Are you an educator looking for STEAM resources for middle school, high school or university? Take a look at Arduino Education kits and how they can support your hands-on STEAM lessons.