Laboratory Safety Challenge

Getting students to comply with laboratory safety rules and teaching them proper lab technique are two of the most important responsibilities of every science teacher. How can you get your students to take ownership of the safety rules, to accept responsibility for lab safety for their own benefit? A great way to show students that the safety rules make a lot of sense is to role-play what happens when the rules are deliberately ignored or violated. The purpose of the laboratory safety challenge is to have students witness lab procedures gone awry, and then use their observations to derive a common-sense set of safety rules.