Reflective Blog #6

Reflective Blog #6

This is my sixth blog already and its gone by so fast and I've been learning so much and having lots of fun doing so.  Last Monday we blew Luke up.  Actually we blew up the bag underneath him and raised him up nusing the power of pressure.  When we put more particles in the bag they needed a place to go and the bag grew and grew until Lukes back wasn't even touching the table anymore.  When there are more particles they hit the bag harder and expanded it.  We also decided that we should also make molecules have some sort of motion.  We also worked on this Tuesday befor the PVTn labs

This was are molecule diagram of luke on the bag

Tuesday was when the fun really began with the PVTn labs. But as soon as we tryed to start logger pro magicallly removed itself from the computers and we were left to do nothing for the rest of class but talk.  Then on Wednesday it finally happened  we started the lab.  Fist lab we did was the pressure vs volume, we learned ho the more volume you have the less pressure you have and vise versa but this is proportional to the amount of volume and there can't be zero pressure and there can't be zero volumeso it makes a curved line.  This prinicpal we learned was called bolye's law.  Then after that lab we did the pressure vs number or puffs.  This graph had the shape we expected it to as it went followed our predictions.

On friday we did the last and final PVTn lab, this was centered around tempuature we set up the graph which was slightly more complicated than the other ones to set up.  Then my group started and after the first two we realised tha some thing wasn't right with our data and you told us that we would just have to steal someone else's data because the seal was broken.  But we did learn about kalvin and absolute zero where kalvin hits zero pressure and there would be no particle movement, which would be cool.  The number for absolut zero was something around -273 and that we have come so cose to absolute zero by margins of a fraction of a degree

On Friday we talked about how we're going to do the formal lab report and we started to print the data on the laptops and talking about when this big project is due and other logisticy stuff.  We had slight technicanl issues printing the graph but all was resolved.

I saw this article in the new issue of Popular science and thought you would like it.   http://www.popsci.com/z-machines-hydrogen-gambit

 

Reflective Blog #5

Reflective Blog #5

This week was one full of big tests and lots of reviewing.  The one big test that we took only in chem was the unit one chapter test and that one was pretty easy at least for me it wasn't and a hard one that took up half of our day.  On Monday we presented our boards of what we had learned through the unit, our boards were filled with stuff like sig figs and volume, mass, and density. This review was nice because some of the stuff we covered I had either forgotten about it or needed a refresher about it.

This wasn't my group's board but this was the group I thought did the best job of review

On Tuesday we took the big test, I while feeling prepared couldn't help feeling a little nervous about not getting a very good grade.  For me it was smooth sailing through the test and only one problem tripped me up but I skipped it until everything else was done and solved it later.  When looking at my grade I am a little mad that I was a half point off from a perfect score but am happy for the good grade.  After the test I was really bored so I took it out on a mechanical pencil, completely  stripping it and destroying the innards.

On Wednesday there is almost nothing to report, we just sat around in Mrs. Warner's room eating our lunches and sitting on our phones.  On Thursday though we did 2 fun activities.  First we smelled popcorn and whiteboarded how the smell particles moved across the room and while we white boarded that we ate popcorn then we presented them to the class.  After that activity we put food coloring in hot and cold water and saw which one moved faster.  The hot one moved faster and we concluded that warmer molecules move faster than cold ones

our white board for how the smell particles moved across the room

On Friday we finished whiteboarding how the dye moves through the water in cold and hot situations and presented them to the class.  Also on friday we watched some videos and went over how mass is always moving and how they move in a solid and liquids but didn't get to gases at least not in my class.  So all in all this week I learned a few things like how molecules move and we gained the ability to call them molecules, so it was a good week

Reflective Blog #4

Reflective Blog #4

This week in 3rd hour was full of learning and quizzes.  We as a class did a lot of worksheets and one or two activities as table groups. First off on Monday we finished up whiteboarding worksheet 3 on number five and finished it up.  My favorite question of this packet was the question about the ring and if Alicia should dump her boyfriend for giving her a phony ring, I'm pretty sure the class decided that she should dump him.  Even though we never did question eight we still moved on.  Tewusday we did an interesting activity of find the density of a gas.  Our first atempt was foiled when the bottle in the water tipped.  I think this happened because we had around a pill and a half so it made more gas then the light bottle could trap so it erupted from the bottom and tip over.  We found that the density of the gas was nearly 600% less dense than water so when we did a particle diagram it was less than 1 to 600 but we learned to draw gases with very few particles

The gas rising to the top of the bottle

On Wednesday we did worksheet four where we learned to find mass or volume with density and either mass or volume depending on which one you were given in the first place, this method is pretty easy to remember how to do. We did a lot of the problems on the back with you going over them afterwards. This was very helpful to me as it is less likely to be done wrong than other equations.
Thursday you had told us that we were having a test so the night before I made a quizlet set and studied it for a little bit, it was a nice review to me.  The actual test wasn't hard at all and I aced with ease. At first you accidently handed me Bobby's quiz and I thought I had done horrible but then me and Bobby switched and everything was alright, for me at least. After the test we did an activity to find the thickness of aluminum foil and we had to come up with procedure first.  We found the mass and took the density of aluminum to find the volume and the took the two dimensions that we knew to find the thickness we did have a little computing error but we fixed it once we found out,  It was so thin and the heavy duty was about 1.5 times thicker for most data.

My table's data and calculations

Friday you gave us another quiz and gave us back our old ones. This quiz was just as easy as the last one and I'm sure that I ace it too.  After the quiz you handed back and went over the reading scales worksheet.  Tables were assigned questions and went up to the board and wrote the answer, other poeple were allowed to come up and write their number if they thought the group was wrong.  I really liked this way of reviewing because it meant you could disagree and vioce your opinion or correct mistakes. All in all this week was fun and their was lots of learning


 

Reflective blog #3

Reflective blog #3

This week was a week full of learning in 3rd hour as we learned the correlation between mass and volume and the relationship between cubic centimeters and mL.  With all this new knowledge in my brain I shall reflect on what I have learned and refresh my memory.  On Monday we started to discuss the relationship between cubic centimeters and milliliters. we did this by pouring some water into a rectangular, clear box and found the volume of the water, then we poured the water into a graduated cylinder and found how many mL it was.  Our table got a line of best fit with a slope around .940, which is pretty close to the 1 we would have gotten if we had done the experiment perfectly, I account this to human error. We would have gotten a 1 because one cubic centimeter of anything equals 1 mL of the same thing.  We didn't a formal white board meeting but you did go around and talk about each tables data yourself. This also carried over into Tuesday. 

My table's data from the activity

After we were done talking about cm3 and mL we talked about mass and volume and how they relate. You had us start getting the mass of the 3 different materials which were aluminium, steel and acrylic each with five different pieces of various sizes. Then on Wednesday we did the volume of each materials in graduated cylinders by taking the before and after measurements of the water. then at the end of Wednesday and beginning of Thursday we used the tool logger pro to help graph our data and put in lines of best fit for all our data.  We then talked about how  density is a combination between volume and mass, we also learned that since waters g/mL or measurement of density anything higher than that sinks.  A funny thing that happened on Thursday was that halfway through the class we were asked to go to a thing where we meet the counselor and because of that the remaining juniors and seniors didn't have to do the worksheet until the next day.

My table finding the volume of a steel cylinder

This worksheet that I previously mentioned above was what we focused on for most of Friday.  Basically what we did was, you'd ask us as a table to do one or two problems and then we would whiteboard our answers.  We did this for questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 but for 4 we did a class debate over who was right.  Almost all of the other side changed their minds and the few who didn't couldn't back up their opinion with evidence.  The other questions that we white boarded were all about comparing mass, volume and density.

My table's answers for number 3

So all in all this week we learned about how density is affected by volume and mass. Plus the unit for measuring things density in g/mL.  I have to say that this week was a good week not to miss or I would have had a lot of catching up to do.