Before watching, you may want to review or introduce some basic chemistry terms, such as element, compound, and chemical bond. If you have a periodic table of elements available, use it as a visual aid. Locate carbon on the table and explain to students that carbon is an element, but it is found most often as a component in many common compounds. A main challenge faced by the scientists in this program is to determine the structure of a particular type of carbon molecule. To prepare the students for this aspect of the program, try some simple tessellation activities.
Tessellations are shapes that, when fitted together, cover a flat surface with no gaps.
Have the students sketch other shapes that might tessellate easily. Soon after discovering that they had created a new form of carbon, scientists began trying to create a molecular model. Ask the students to reflect on this process of developing and testing a theory. In building simple models of molecules, the corners, or vertices, represent the outermost atoms in the molecule. In constructing a molecular model, each vertex represents an atom.