Xiwen (Julie) Hu is creating her own periodic table project. She is a 16 year-old IB student in Brandon Yates’s chemistry class at Beijing City International School, Beijing, China. She wanted to pull together her love for chemistry, visual arts and digital media. Working with Tsinghua University Press and Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Julie has started an initiative called Alchemy Science Visualisation1 to promote STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) education. The Periodic Graphics of Elements is one of her projects.
Julie was inspired by the Royal Society of Chemistry's Public Attitudes of Chemistry Campaign,2 articles in Chemistry World and Behance3. In May 2016 she applied her abilities to design a tile for carbon to commemorate Sir Harry Kroto, who had passed away in April 2016. Sir Harry helped discover buckminsterfullerenes, also known as “buckyballs”. That was the start of The Periodic Graphics. Since her idea worked so
well, she carried on working on the graphics of other elements. Her goal is to create tiles for all the 118 elements by summer and open up an exhibition in Beijing to communicate chemistry to a broader audience. At the time of printing, Julie has completed over 20 tiles and continues to post her creative new tiles.1
Julie has submitted tiles for our New Elements Contest — see other early submissions on the next page. This is how we discovered Julie. Julie’s teacher submitted her tiles and as we were tweeting out early submissions (@chem13news), we discovered Julie had created tiles for more than the four newly-named elements. Have your students follow Julie’s project, as well as submit their designs to the New Elements Contest.
- Alchemy: @alchemysciviz Facebook and Twitter
- www.rsc.org/campaigning-outreach/campaigning/public-attitudes-chemistry
- Behance is an online platform to showcase and discover creative work,www.behance.net
