Reflective Blog #8

Reflective Blog #8

This blog actually covers a week and two days because of the previously extended blog that I am very grateful for.  So this blog starts on Thursday when we learned about the heating curve by doing a lab with ice and hot plates.  We use the graphing program to graph the temperature vs. time and found that the graph plateaus as it changes phases and then shoots up as the temperature increases. We learned that it takes a lot of energy from the hot plate to change phases which explains the plateau in temperature on the graph.  Then we started LOLing our way through energy bar charts, we used them to model energy leaving or entering an object.  This is a good way to model this because you can see how energy is moving with out doing any hard equations. While learning all of this we did many problems and worksheets, usally whiteboarding them and presenting our work to the class.

One of the more complicated energy bar chart problems

Once we had a handle on the barcharts we upgraded to quantitative problems.  These use the formulas Q=m*c*delta T , Q=m*Hv and Q=m*Hf where Hf is heat of fusion or the energy in joules (J) per gram needed melt or freeze (334 J/g) and Hv is the heat of vaporization of the energy in joules per gram need to boil into a gas something or to condence it into a liquid (2260 J/g). The other variables are a little less complicated m is mass in grams and delta T is the change in temperature but c in the heat capacity of either liquid water (4.18 J/gC) or solid water (2.1 J/gC).

Basically all we did was learn how to do this stuff and then apply it to doing lots of worksheets to at least know how to do the problems but we did learn a hole lot.  Some other things we did this week were talk about our final on monday and how we can use our notebooks on the final. while doing these problems I tried to help as much as possible to be useful but Lizzie would often have th problem done before me.

This is my last S/G chem blog and I'm sad I won't be in your class anymore Dr. Finnan.