College of Science at UOB Celebrates the Arab Chemistry Week with Entertaining Scientific Experiments

With the
Participation of more than 200 Public School Students

College of Science
at UOB Celebrates the Arab Chemistry Week with Entertaining Scientific
Experiments

On Wednesday (30 October 2019),
the Department of Chemistry at the College of Science at the University of
Bahrain (UOB) celebrated the Arab Chemistry Week, in the Department of
Chemistry at the University campus in Sakhir, in conjunction with the celebrations
of universities and institutes specializing in chemistry in the Arab world. The
celebration was held for the second year in a row at the College and was
attended by professors and students at the College of Science of all its
scientific departments, in addition to more than 20 government secondary
schools.

It’s worth mentioning that the
Arab Chemistry Week is celebrated every year in the last week of October, to
raise awareness of chemistry and to influence the new generation to love it.

The head of the Chemistry
Department, Dr. Laila Mohammad Al-Shaqri, stated: “More than 200 students from
public schools participated in the event, not to mention the professors and
students of the University’s College of Science,” pointing to the live fun
scientific experiments in which the students participated, and through which
they benefited in a practical way to gain scientific information related their
daily life. And she added: “Participants learned about the amount of sugar
in juices, calories in foods, and the effect of drinking tea immediately after
eating on the body’s ability to absorb iron, and measuring the proportion of
vitamin C in drinks”. Noting that one of the most important goals of
holding Chemistry Week is to communicate with the community and introduce it to
the importance of chemistry science in life, introduce high school students to the
essence of this science, and to attract them to specialize in it in university.

For his part, the head of the
scientific committee organizing the event, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Dr.
Sadiq Mahdi Al-Alawi, stated that during the current academic semester, the
Department of Chemistry at the College of Science published 10 studies in scholarly
scientific journals, most of which are American and European journals of participating
professors and students and related to the technical aspects of natural
products such as energy extraction, production of biofuels from the kernel of
food, utilization of minerals available in natural products such as fenugreek, green
leaves (cilantro) and soil, and research related to the carbon footprint that
is related to high temperatures.

Furthermore, Dr. Al-Alawi pointed
out that the aim of Arab Chemistry Week is to educate the public in general,
and school and university students in particular, about the importance of
chemistry, as it is one of the constantly changing and vital sciences that
touches on all aspects of life, due to its association with food, clothes, and
even the air we breathe and the ground we walk on. Indicating that the
entertaining scientific experiments provided by the Department of Chemistry at UOB
to the visitors introduced them to the role of chemistry in their lives in a
smooth manner.

Also, it is worth noting that the
Arab Chemistry Week was launched at the meeting of the thirty-third session of
the Supreme Council of the Union of Arab Chemists, which was held in the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in April 2014. As the Supreme Council had taken its
decision to choose June 14 as the Arab Chemistry Day, which is the day of the
anniversary of the founding of the Union of Arab Chemists.
However, on the Council’s meeting on March of the following year (2015) in
Tunis, the Council decided to make it a full Arab week of chemistry instead of
one day, to give the opportunity to chemical associations, chemical unions,
university departments, institutes and schools to celebrate this week, increase
awareness on chemistry and to make the new generation love chemistry. And so,
it was decided that the last week of October of every year would be an Arab
Chemistry Week.