Another Scimatics project has wrapped up. In this Summative post, Ill explain what I had to do, what I learned, and what I thought of the project. Im going to be honest, I was pretty disappointed with my grade, but all and all I actually enjoyed the project. Here’s why:

From December 22 to January 25, we learned all about ionic bonds and covalent compounds. Im going to get this out of the way first. Here’s the video so you can learn all about the two bonding types 

So In the early stages of the project, like all other Scimatics project before it,, we had to creat a project start mind map. The mind maps at the start and the ending of the project are great ways to show evidence of our learning. 

As you can see I had a lot of questions about the animation and the chemistry itself. We had done this before in grade 8, but we weren’t really learning about covalent and ionic bonds. It was more like how matter reacts under different temperatures, which would be a very small part of this project. 

So this project was the most complicated for me and on top of that, we had to make an animation, something I’ve never done before. We learned how to make an animation in keynote, the presentation software that I thought was like google slides. It turns out, you can animate objects and images. However, the animation tools are pretty basic, but they work and if you put some effort and A LOT of time, you can make a pretty good animation.

I really didn’t understand all this atom, bonding, and naming stuff at the beginning, but After weeks of learning through textbooks and workbooks, I finally knew everything about covalent and Ionic bonds. And then, winter break hit. Mr Gross said that we didn’t need to work on it during winter break, so like any other human being I enjoyed my 3 weeks off from school. When I came back, I almost forgot everything I learned. I used some textbooks to jog my memory back and I was ready. Then as soon as I got back to school, the first week, I caught the vid’.

At home, I had a lot more time to work on my hands. It was tough to work when your recovering from a virus, and I still had to work on french projects, a lot of humanity’s work especially when they were teaching very crucial parts of information in class. And I hade to work with my engineering partner from home and coordinate instructions and what no at home. And a massive animation, because while most people story lines were 6 little square boxes with lines under them describing what they would put in those boxes, mine looked a little like this: 

 

So I had a lot of work to do. Now I wasn’t rushed at all, I actually had a pretty good plan on how I would tackle this animating process. (Don’t tell Ms. Willemse, but I put a lot more time into the animation than I did to her poems). It was quite the grind. I didn’t find the animating hard, but it was very time consuming. If you watch the video, (unlike a lot of my other projects, I would say the animation quality actually rises. Throughout the end. Also, I as the video went on, I added a lot more extending quality’s. For both ionic bond and covalent bond parts of the video I had a portion on how they form, and quality’s of the bond. (I also added a different types of covalent bonds in the covalent bond portion.

In the end I got an accomplished. Which is good, but I was extremely disappointed. I put a lot of time and effort into this project, maybe even the most I’ve ever put into a Scimatics project. I animated over 6 and a half minutes of pure chemistry goodness, with a intro, and outro. I had over 302 builds (which are like object movements) which is a lot of time. In the beginning of the video, (probably a victim of me forgetting everything about this covalent and Ionic bonds or a brain fart) I called a covalent bond a cohesive bond. 😭 Idk how, but that slipped. And I also mixed up the magnesium and chlorine charges (smh). And I had the wrong amount of electrons on magnesium. I think I deserved an extending, but all in all, these grades are just words, the real grade is how much I learned, I and I can tell you right now, I now know way more about covalent and ionic bonds than I did in grade before the project, and that feels better than a rainbow emoji (but that would’ve been nice).

 

Project Start ⬆️  Project end⬇️