Engage your kid's minds throughout the summer with these FUN weekly at-home STEM projects! 

How do you make glow in the dark slime? A super easy basic saline solution recipe is used and a glow powder is added for some super glowing slime that doesn’t even need a black light. Making slime is an awesome activity for kids!

What you will need:

1. 1/2 cup Clear Washable PVA School Glue
2. Saline Solution (must contain sodium borate and boric acid as ingredients)
3. 1/2 cup water
4. 1/2 tablespoon glow powder
5. 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

The science: 

The glow in the powder is from phosphorescent crystals. This powder absorbs light and then gives off the lovely glow over a length of time (before needing to be recharged). This glow occurs when electrons absorb energy from light, so make sure to find a sunny place.

When you play with your glow in the dark slime is a dark place, these same electrons produce a glow which is energy in the form of light we can see. There isn’t a chemical reaction that occurs except for the slime making process. 

Check out another slime experiment demonstrated by Collins and Devan Key durring the Next Gen STEM X-STEM All Access epsiode! 

Asteroid Day is a UN-sanctioned global awareness campaign participated annually on June 30. The mission is to inspire, engage and educate the public about asteroids opportunities and risks. Every year, there is an Asteroid Day live broadcast with asteroid content and commentary from astronauts, experts and celebrities. Watch the broadcast today!

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Janina M. Jeff, Ph.D., M.S., is a human geneticist, educator, and minority science technology engineering math (STEM) activist. She is currently a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Illumina, where she develops pipelines to analyze population specific genome-wide data to enable healthy population screening. In 2018, Dr. Jeff was selected as one of the three winners out of 18,000 applicants for Spotify’s Sound-Up Bootcamp in support of her podcast, In Those Genes, a podcast that uses genetics to decode the lost histories and futures of African descended Americans through the lens of Black culture.