Product review: MEL Chemistry set

The MEL Chemistry starter kit

I recently saw the MEL Chemistry set and I decided that I wanted to try it out, so I contacted MEL via Twitter and asked if they could send me a few sets. A week or two later, a big box arrived. Needless to say, my kids were pretty excited.

It's a really interesting idea; you get a full set of chemistry glassware, including lab glasses (reasonably comfortable, if I do say so myself), a small Erlenmeyer, a small beaker, a 60 mL syringe and seriously detailed chemistry/safety manual.

I also received 5 sets of experiments:

• "Chemistry of monsters" (doing various experiments carbonizing sugar)
• "Tin" (Tin dendrites/a tin "hedgehog" experiment)
• "Chemical eraser" (fun with permanganate/disodium disulfite, among other things)
• "Zinc-carbon battery"
• "Colorful chemistry" (pH indicators) 

As a parent who is a scientist, I think we've received all the different "chemistry at home" kits out there. They are all uniformly mediocre. Sadly, I'll point out here that the most remarkable thing about the Magic School Bus chemistry kit is that it's shaped like a school bus - other than that, it's got the same mix of weak acid, weak base and plastic test tubes as the rest of the lot.*

The experiment kits

Not so for the MEL Chemistry kits. Over the course of three weeks, I tried these out with my kids. I liked them; they are small (5 mL or so), so there's not a lot of waste generated during the experiment. There is enough to try again (we didn't get the zinc-carbon battery to work the first time, so we're gonna loop around to that one again.) My older child really enjoyed (as do most kids, I suspect) the pH indicator lab. The making of tin dendrites with tin chloride and a battery was pretty cool, we all thought, and we brought a good bit of consternation and fun to the house when we decided to light a mix of sugar, baking soda and hexamine powder to make a "sugar snake." (The smoke cleared pretty quickly, and I did not manage to burn the house down.) You're not gonna find this stuff at Target. 

I didn't get to try out the app that goes with the kits, nor the virtual reality glasses, unfortunately. (Someday, a smartphone to call my own.) 

I have two caveats that I have about the MEL Chemistry kits: first, these kits are prominently labeled with a "12+" label. While I could quibble with the age limit, I have to say that there are enough materials to cause some amount of consternation (potassium permanganate, iodine solution, hexamine) that younger children most certainly should not be unsupervised around these sets, which is not something you'd say about typical store-bought chemistry kits. 

Oxidizing away ink with potassium permanganate

The other thing to note is that the kits are pretty pricey: it's ~$40 for the starter kit, and then another $36 per month for the 3 experiments a month that you can receive. You gotta have a kid who really likes science, I'd imagine, for that to pencil out.  

Overall, I'd give a strong recommendation for the MEL chemistry kits for older kids who are getting bored with the boring chemistry kits and want to give a shot at something a little more advanced. "I thought this was a lot cooler than the other kits," my older child said - and I agree. 

*OK, so the idea that the Magic School Bus kit has that you should learn these skills first (observation, notebook skills, etc) before doing experiments is probably valuable. The rest of it is pretty ho-hum.

Apart from receiving the kit, Chemjobber received no compensation for this review.