Family | Life | Food | Travel

16 January 2015

Cool Chemistry (and your chance to WIN!)

Learning through play is one of the best ways to educate children and the Plasma Reactor Kit combines both science and fun in a box. The Mini Mes loved it as it enabled them to be creative and watch chemical reactions take place all while finding out some interesting facts about how the things around us really work. I may have even learnt a thing or two myself in the process!





Included in the box: 


  • Rocket base stand, base feet, nose and beaker
  • LED Light
  • Coloured fizzing tablets
  • Pipette
  • Measuring cups
  • Stirring rod
  • Instructions



The booklet includes information on setting the equipment up and a detailed guide on how to complete 5 experiments; alien plasma strings, bubbling light rocket, colour-changing light rocket, and our two favourites which are the colourful jellyfish bubbles and colourful bubble rocket. It also tells children all about the different states of matter in a way that they will understand which is really useful.

Minxy in particular has always loved my giant lava lamp in the lounge so this was perfect for her as she could make her own miniature version!





By combining water and oil together within the rocket then adding the fizzing tablets we were able to see colourful bubbles rise to the surface. The tablets are different colours so the Mini Mes took it turns to add their favourites to see the reactions.

Next we tried the colourful jellyfish bubbles, again by just using a mixture of water and oil, but with a little food colouring added too this time. The Mini Mes read the step by step instructions and followed along with ease. They used the pipette to collect and squirt the coloured water into the rocket carefully then watched as the fluid balls dispersed - they looked quite like jellyfish!




For just £13 the Plasma Reactor is a great little buy for the budding scientist. It is aimed at children aged 8+ but I feel if supervised children a lot younger could have a go with this too. The rocket is quick to clean up and although we didn't have any spillages it is probably best to pop down some newspaper or have some tissue to hand.

It was a little smaller than we expected from the image on the box but it is good quality and something a little different to bring out on a rainy day for entertainment.

You can pick up yours from the Science Museum shop.




For your chance to win a Plasma Reactor Kit you can enter via the Gleam entry form below.
Leaving a comment is mandatory but there are additional methods of entry available also.
The giveaway ends on 13th February 2015 at 11.59pm GMT.

Good luck!

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109 comments

  1. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.

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  2. My children are always learning through play - we play shops and they learn about money and different coins!

    Ashleigh

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  3. Did you know that there are 206 bones in the adult human body and there are 300 in children (as they grow some of the bones fuse together).

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  4. The trickiest tongue twister in the English language is apparently "Sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick". Give it a try and see for yourself :)

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  5. About 65 billion neutrinos will pass through your fingernail in a second

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  6. Humans get a little taller in space because there is no gravity pulling them down!

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  7. My little one.learns by doing what he has read about in order to understand better

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  8. Me and my son love games and creating things together, he has a few non-educational board games but the majority are educational and I always do everything in my power to make them fun and interesting for him :)

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  9. AMANDA ROBINSON16/01/2015, 11:33

    My 2 girls are ALWAYS role playing. Most of the time they are playing schools/teachers or writing stories

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  10. My little girl is a Schema, they have certain ways of learning through play. They tend to group things by colour , shape, or size. We found out my daughter had this at parents evening at nursery in November, we always knew she liked things a certain way, like for example, she has a big box of Megabloks, and would seperate them by colour. we just thought it was some sort of OCD, until the school told us. Its her way of learning. As she is the only child in her class who has this, the teachers have started doing activities such as sorting, so she can get more involved. There are different types of schema, and she has 3 kinds, which makes activities really fun for her, she likes to collect things, and line them up, and putting things in bags and carrying them around. Its fun as now we know how she can learn through simple games

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  11. The Central American salamander Bolitoglossa dofleini can extend its tongue more than half its body length in 7 milliseconds, 50 times faster than you can blink an eye.

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  12. My son can play with toys straight away and know what to do with them, even if he hasn't played before and he can fix toys even when mummy can't and he's four years old, works out puzzles quickly and so he's on 5+ puzzles now which are a bit harder :-| he has quite the logical brain

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  13. If all the LEGO bricks ever manufactured were clipped on top of one another, they would make a tower ten times as high as the distance to the Moon

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  14. Maria O'Sullivan16/01/2015, 16:43

    you use more muscles to frown than to smile!

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  15. poo particles go into the bathroom air when you flush the toilet!!

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  16. 2015 will have a leap second! the 30th of June will have one second added to it which could cause problems for computer companies.

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  17. Smile don't frown - you use less muscles smiling

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  18. Ellie is learning through play all the time, but we have been looking at reversible and non reversible actions this week, we experimented with eggs at lunchtime.

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  19. i love to get my boys into the allotment & they learn so much about the food they eat, where it comes from & importance of eating healthy

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  20. Your nose and ears continue to grow for life!!!!!!!!!!

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  21. not great with scientific facts but I do many things with my grandchildren and the volcano still amazes me. They love making / setting off stuff.

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  22. african landsnails are hermaphrodites (both male and female)

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  23. my kids are obsessed with gadgets at the moment, I am always on the look out for fun activities to drag them away

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  24. My child is always learning how things work when he uses them.

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  25. Antibiotic Resistance is the ability of bacteria which have acquired a resistance gene to survive the action of an antibiotic drug that kills antibiotic-sensitive bacteria from the same strain. It's important to take a full course of antibiotics as stopped halfway through means the antibiotic resistant bacteria haven't been overwhelmed by the dose of antibiotic administered.

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  26. A single bolt of lightning contains enough energy to cook 100,000 pieces of toast.

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  27. Glass is a very slow moving liquid not a solid

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  28. My kids must learn through play as some of the plot lines they have going on in their role plays are amazing :)

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  29. we love to find experiments we can do at home.

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  30. If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.

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  31. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  32. as a family wea lways love new things and science that makes things fun

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  33. Imagination is a great key to play and my daughter has a wild imagination!

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  34. In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand!

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  35. Gas has no natual smell - it's added for safey!

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  36. Water is the only substance where the solid form floats in the liquid. Or something ;)

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  37. Many of the stars that we see in the night sky may already be dead, but their light is still travelling to reach us. By the time we see them disappear they will have been dead thousands of years.

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  38. We often play with cornflour & water mix which my children love & i have been teaching them about why its hard when you hit it but soft if you pick it up!

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  39. A medium-sized cumulus cloud weighs about the same as 80 elephants

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  40. I doscovered the other day that instead of playing games on her tablet, my daughter is learning french! :-)

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  41. Archie likes his magnifying glass.... quite scarey how insects look made bigger

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  42. If all the LEGO bricks ever manufactured were clipped on top of one another, they would make a tower ten times as high as the distance to the Moon.

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  43. The boy is obsessed with all things science. Amazes me how much he can absorb!

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  44. My niece and nephew learn through watching and re-enacting things out with their toys

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  45. hello fab giveaway !!!
    did you know
    Jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets:
    It turns on its axis once every 9 hours and 55 minutes. The rapid rotation flattens the planet slightly, giving it an oblate shape. !!!

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  46. My kids learnt about molecular weights by doing science experiments in the kitchen.

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  47. my children learn something every day, we do a lot of role playing and reading books together.

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  48. My son learns through play. He learns that if its his own money he spends in the shops on toys which aren't up to much - he's much less likely to buy toys in the future!

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  49. My second eldest loves a good potion - like in George's Marvelous Medicine

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  50. When river water and sea water meet inana estuary they don't mix, they form two layers

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  51. My 2 year old loves learning through play. She likes making and turning a wheel and axle with her GoldieBlox set.

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  52. Kids learn best through play (in my opinion, lol) and we play cafe's - learn about food/snacks, money etc, we've also purchased one of the science sets and had some great fun - making a jelly brain, fart in a tub. We have even tried making our own volcanoe - paper-mache volcano, vinegar, food colouring and bi-carb - lots of great fun, not sure who enjoys it more

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  53. Lynsey Buchanan25/01/2015, 03:36

    We are playng add and subtraction snap at the moment was only £1 a pack and its realy challaging my daughter to count quickly

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  54. an orange with its peel on will float whereas a peeled orange will sink. This because air in the pocked skin keep it afloat.

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  55. Whatever our two elder kids (3 and 2) are doing, they are learning. At the moment my kids are playing shops, so they're learning maths and literacy skills

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  56. The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime

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  57. The heart of a cat beats 150 times per minute!

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  58. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  59. The percentage of the dog's brain that is devoted to analyze smells is 40 times larger than that of a human x

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  60. Nice prize!

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  61. my brother is the scientist in our family - and his children are all taking after him, they love experiments, the universe and stars and all sciencey stuff. Me, not so much the chemistry side but I'll endeavour to find an interesting fact before this competition is over

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  62. Scottish Scientist John Logie Baird used a coffin lid & a biscuit tin to create his first television

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  63. our 8 year old grandson never ceases to amaze me by scientific facts he comes out with and he loves to build models, in middle of building solar syatem at mo

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  64. My son loves science and history, he enjoys me reading fact books to him! :)

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  65. sarah-dawn pope30/01/2015, 18:04

    An adult person is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

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  66. A single bolt of lightning contains enough energy to cook 100,000 pieces of toast.

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  67. My son loves scrabble to help learn new words, though half the time his words are made up!

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  68. Mentors mint in a coke bottle and watch it explode

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  69. Egg shells in a can of coke

    Kay panayi

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  70. I was always useless at Science/chemistry so I can't think of anything at all. My children learnt a lot from various things; counting and spelling songs, playing shops, card games like snap for memory, and, I probably shouldn't say this, but the TV as well.

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  71. I enjoy Science as I worked in a Lab for 6 years and have A-levels in chem and biology. I love helping my kids learn about new facts and we like to look things up on the internet together. We did do a little experiment with me putting dry ice into water, orange juice and milk to show them and we were all having fun seeing which ones bubbled up and made the most mess haha. My children are fortunate to have a toy room and they love role play learning with the white board (pretending to play teachers and school) and playing with their toy kitchen and dolls, learning how to count with blocks and learning all sorts of things and skills with various toys.

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  72. it's the male seahorse that gives birth

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  73. There are more molecules of water in a glass of water, than glasses of water in all the oceans in the world.

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  74. My daughter learns a lot through extra curricular activities such as French club, Rainbows and ballet and tap class.

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  75. my son learns through play money and testing science from cbbc

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  76. my godson shay who is only 3 loves anything that is science based especially if it ends in a big bang or a mess

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  77. What a lovely kit. An exciting way to learn

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  78. Paula Readings10/02/2015, 11:09

    An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.

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  79. Even travelling at the speed of light, it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda!

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  80. your brain is more active at night than during the day

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  81. me and my kids are always looking for different things to do and discuss this month were looking at the solar system.

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  82. Infants only blink once or twice a minute whereas adults blink around 10

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  83. It takes approximately 12 hours for food to entirely digest.

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  84. My daughter loves learning through sensory play

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  85. If you go back 10 generations, you have 1024 ancestors in that generation alone. That's a lot of genetic material that has been passed down & down to create you!

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  86. You cannot lick your elbow - leanne w

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  87. My son learns through play we love to learn counting by lining up objects and counting them then we group them in to categories i.e colours shapes etc he loves it :)

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  88. My son has learnt a lot about engineering through lego

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  89. Doing things as simple as cooking together can teach a lot to a child on things as simple as turning a liquid into a solid.

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  90. If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.

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  91. 100 years ago: The first virus was found in both plants and animals.

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  92. Maria Jane Knight12/02/2015, 19:32

    The Sun is over 300000 times larger than earth.

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  93. Uranus' original name was George!

    Herschel did not name the planet Uranus, he called it "the Georgium Sidus" (the Georgian Planet) in honor of King George III of England. The name "Uranus" was first proposed by German astronomer Johann Elert Bode in order for it to be in conformity with the other planetary names - which are from classical mythology.

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  94. Even though it so big, Jupiters day is only 9 hours long!

    trevor linvell

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  95. Colours are the easiest to learn as you can use cars or trains which you can name with the colour in the title, i.e. Reg the big red bus, Willie the white Van

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  96. children are always learning

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  97. The longest time between two twins being born is 87 days

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  98. learning all the time when playing that's the best way

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  99. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons

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  100. There are currently 8 planets in our solar system

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  101. My kids love role play and arts and crafts :)

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  102. At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

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  103. Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

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  104. Krystina Smith13/02/2015, 17:48

    From QI: If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side

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  105. We try and teach our kids about money and maths skills by playing shops and letting them help us in the real shops.

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  106. Under extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter! (learnt this on QI!)

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  107. You loose 100 hairs a day

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  108. Rachael Cunliffe13/02/2015, 22:29

    Every cell in your body is renewed every seven years (that explain why my husband acts like a seven year old!)

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