Chemistry Week 7

This week in chemistry, we learned some knew formulas and came to a few consensuses.

First, we went back to discussing the experiment we did last week with the ethanol and the water. We figured out that ethanol requires less energy for its particles to expand because its less dense. 

After that, we came to a consensus that temperature is a measure of the energy of particles, measuring the speed of the particles (velocity). The average velocity (energy) of all of your particles is your temperature! 

On Tuesday, we focused on pressure. Pressure is equal to Force(newtons) divided by your Area (meters squared). We measure pressure in Pascals (Pa). According to this formula, if you decrease your area, your pressure increases and if you increase your force, the pressure will increase. Some factors that might affect the pressure of a gas would be the volume of the gas and the temperature. For example:

The pressure of the gas in A would be greater because the volume is less than in B.

On Wednesday, we used a pressure reader thingy and a syringe to find out what happens when you change the volume of the pressure source. We found out that as your volume increases, your pressure decreases. We also had to find the formula of what was going on. We used the inverse and found of that P(pressure)=k(constant)1/v(volume). The k or constant of proportionality equates 2 things. In this case, the constant was the TEMPERATURE. So, Pressure=Temperature/Volume 

On Thursday, we had to complete another lab to figure out if you keep the temperature and volume constant but change the number of particles in the volume, what would happen to the pressure. we figured out that if you increase the number of particles in the same amount of volume, your pressure increases. 

On Friday, Mr Abud wasn't in class so as a ChemTeam, we had to create a study guide for our quiz on Wednesday. 

Chemistry Week 6

Chemistry this week focused a lot on just plain learning rather than doing labs.
On Monday and part of Tuesday, we went over our summary of unit 1. Doing this helped me just basically sum everything up and understand everything we learned as a whole. Once all the groups were done presenting their whiteboards, we did a sort of lab with popcorn and dry ice.
The dry ice was super duper cool and looked like it was floating on the table. We used this to show how this substance went from a solid straight to a gas. We drew a particle diagram about this. My groups looked like this:

We used the arrows to simulate the particles moving away from the solid part of the dry ice. Then, we did a lab with the popcorn. Everybody closed their eyes and Mr Abud opened up a bag of popcorn. We had to draw a particle diagram for how the smell travelend and it looked the same as the dry ice diagram we drew.

On Wednesday, we got new seats... Then we did a mini lab about with these two test tubes containing water in one and ethonol in another. We put them both in a container that had water in it and put it on a hot plate. As the water heated up, the amount of ethonol and water in each tube rose in the little thing on the top. We learned that this is how a thermometer worked. After that, we watched a video that Mr Abud took of dropping food coloring into a container of cold water and one of warm water. The red food coloring that was dropped into the warm water spread faster than the blue food coloring in the cold water.This was because the water molecules of the hot water were moving around more because the water was closer to the gaseous state since it was heated up. Then, we watched one of these weird Eureka videos about what was saw going on. Basically we learned that matter NEVER stops moving, in every state.

On Thursday, we discussed all of these things  and took some notes. We compared solids, liquids, and gases and learned some new terms. Fluidity is how much a liquid flows (applies to liquids and gases). Rigidity is the rigedness or stifness of a solid. Viscosity is the resistance to flow, like Mr Abud's hair. In a solid, the particles are moving, but not very musch. They have a consistent structure called a lattice structure. It is the most dense state and it is rigid. In a liquid, the particles are moving more than in a solid. It is less dense than thes olid and has more fluidity. It doesn't have a lattice structure, instead it takes the shape of the container. It is also warmer than solids. In gas, the particles move the most. It is the last dense stat and has the most fluidity. It has no structure and is the warmest state. 

Lastly, we learned the Dance of the Little Lumps (Molecules). We can demonstrate them using "wooshies" in the following ways:

 



Week 5 Reflection

In chem this week, we basically focused on one thing. That thing was finding the density of a boy vs. a girl. On Monday and Tuesday, we planned out on how we were going to do this. 

At first, we thought that we should use the school pool to figure out the displacement of the water so that we could find the volume of the student so that that we could divide that into the mass. We realized that it would be too hard to figure out the displacement of a person in the pool because a human wouldn't really displace much water in a huge pool. Then we thought maybe we could use a dunk tank type of thing, but we didn't know where we could get one. We ended up figuring out that we could use a 44 gallon trash can. Thomas and Shannon volunteered to be the two students that we would find the density of. They told us their weight and we converted it into grams for the mass and then on Wednesday, we started the lab.
We put a kiddie pool underneath the trash can to catch the displaced water so we could measure it and then we filled up the trash can. Once it was filled to the top, Shannon got in and went all the way under and a bunch of water was displaced and spilled over the top. We then measured how much water fell into the kiddie pool. To do this, we filled up 2 L pop bottles so that it was easier to figure out, and then converted it into mL. Then to find out the density of Shannon, we divided her mass by her volume and it ended up as  .9951 g/mL. We did the same for Thomas and his was 1.047.
On Thursday, we talked about our results.These two densities were very similar and it was too broad of a generalization to say that boys have more density than girls. There were some factors that could have skewed our results, like the water that spilled out of the kiddie pool and the lack of accuracy used in measuring the amount of water. Also, the density of a human depends on their weight and volume, not on their gender. So if somebody, for example, is very fat but has less volume (shorter), they will have a greater density of somebody that is skinnier and has more volume (taller). None of this depends on your gender, just on the person in general. 

Chemistry Week 4

This week in chemistry, we really only got to have 4 days of learning because we had a half day. In these four days, we did a lot of different things.
     First, on Monday, we went to the computer lab and set up our active grade accounts and learned about Mr. Abud's grading method. I like the way that we can retake everything so our grade is actually based on how much we learn. I actually ended up reassessing 4 of the standards and improved all of my grades except for one of them. 
On Tuesday, we worked to figure out the density of a solid. In my case, my group figured out the density of a Starburst. In order to do this, we had to figure out the mass and volume of the Starburst. We found the mass by simply putting it on the scale and measuring what it was. To find the volume, we filled water in a graduated cylinder and measured the volume of the water. Then we dropped the Starburst in the water and figured out the volume of it by measuring the displacement of the water. we found the density to be about 1.5 g/mL. 


     On Wednesday, Mr Abud wasn't there and we had Mr Roberts. Although Mr. Roberts usually just completely takes us off track, we actually got all of our work done. My lab group worked together to figure out the thickness of aluminum foil. To do this, we had the use the density and the mass since we didn't know the "width" part of the volume. We figured out that the thickness of the foil was .0012 cm. 

     On Thursday, we had to figure out the density of a gas. We put water in a flask and put in alka seltzer after we attached the flask to a tub which as attached to a trough filled with water and a bell jar that had 295 mL of water in it. We then found out what the volume of the gas was by measuring the displacement that the alka-seltzer gas caused. The volume of the gas ended up being about .003 g/mL

     On Friday, we compared the densities of a solid, a liquid and a gas. The measurements were as follows:
Solid: 4.2 g/mL
Liquid: 1.0 g/mL
Gas: .003g/mL
This shows that a solid is about 1000 times as dense as a gas and a liquid is about 300 times more dense than a gas. 
After we figured this out, we started to figure out how particle diagrams could be different then how we've been doing them. The diffference in the number of particles could be different, the "togetherness" (how tightly packed it is) could be different, and the size of the particles could be different. We didn't get to figure out if all of these were right yet. I learned that particle diagrams don't just have to be a square, they should be represented with the shape of the thing that your are making a particle diagram of.