Arizona is the Copper State because our crustal rocks contain 1000 times more copper than typical crustal rocks elsewhere, but even at 1% copper, 99% of the rocks are unusable given our current technological capabilities. In this lesson, teachers will learn one way metallurgists separate copper from its ore using electrochemistry and compete to optimize an electrowinning cell to produce the most copper in the shortest time. This lesson features chemistry and physics applications but is also adaptable to other middle and high school science contexts.
