Caution: If you do not use food colouring, your slime should wash off most surfaces and out of most washable fabrics. Food colouring will stain your skin for a while and may stain clothing permanently, so use care if you create coloured slime. You can use disposable gloves to handle the slime until it dries a bit.

You will need:

• White liquid glue
• Borax powder
• Water
• Food colouring

What to do:

1. Fill a quarter of a cup with glue and add the same amount of water.
2. Stir until mixed.
3. Add a few drops of food colouring.
4. Put 1 teaspoon of Borax into another cup and half fill with water. Mix well.
5. Add a few drops of the Borax solution to your cup of glue and stir.
6. You will see slime start to form.
7. Add more Borax solution, a drop at a time, until all the liquid has turned into slime.

Slime can be stored in a zip lock bag.

How does it work?

When you make slime, you are making a polymer. The borax is acting as the crosslinking agent or connector for the glue molecules. Once the glue molecules join together to form even larger molecules called polymers, you get a thickened gel that is very similar to slime.

All plastics are polymers. Other polymers you might find around your home include nylon and polyester in clothes, Teflon coatings on frying pans and styrofoam which is used for packaging.

With one extra ingredient, you can turn your slime into a bouncy ball!

You will need:

• Borax
• Cornstarch
• PVA glue (white or clear)
• Water
• Food colouring (optional)
• Spoon
• 2 small cups

What to do:

1. In one of the cups, mix half a teaspoon of borax with 2 tablespoons of water. Stir until all the borax has dissolved. Add a drop of food colouring if you want.
2. Pour one tablespoon of glue into the other cup. Add 1/2 teaspoon of the borax solution from the first cup and 1 tablespoon of cornstarch. DO NOT STIR! Allow the ingredients to interact with each other for 30 seconds and then you can stir them together.
3. Once the mixture become impossible to stir, take it out of the cup and start molding the ball with your hands.
4. The ball will start out sticky and messy, but will solidify as you mix it.
5. Once the ball is less sticky, try bouncing it.

How does it work?

The glue contains a polymer called polyvinyl acetate (PVA). PVA is a strong and flexible polymer. Cornstarch contains a polymer called amylopectin. Amylopectin gives the ball a property called elasticity. Elasticity allows the ball to return to its original shape after being compressed or stretched, like when it hits the floor. This makes the ball bounce back up instead of splattering everywhere. Like in the slime, the borax is needed to stick the glue and the cornstarch together.

Don't forget to take some pictures of your Slime and send them into us to be in with a chance of winning some great prizes.

The School of Chemistry at NUI Galway advise that adult supervision is needed for all experiments. The portions of materials used in the experiments should not be increased from that described and mixtures prepared should not be ingested. The full text should be read before starting any experiment.

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