Driving Question: How can the behaviour of matter be explained by the kinetic molecular theory and atomic theory?

Answer: I answered the Driving Question by making a simulator that simulated atoms and molecules in different states of matter. My simulator also displayed the kinetic and atomic theory.

Welcome back to my blog! I hope everyone has been good in my long absence, but I am back again with another post! We switched quarters a few weeks ago, and ever since then, I’ve been working hard on a new project. In this new project, we used the app Scratch to code a game or simulator that represented particle motion and states of matter that answered the Driving Question.

I think Milestone 1 definitely was a good starting point for this project because we laid out all of our ideas in a MindMap. We came up with questions that we had and wrote them down. 

Here’s my starting MindMap with my questions:

Here’s what I now know after completing this project:

The next Milestone that really brought some motion (haha, get it?) into this project was Milestone 3. Here is where we took a short test to see how much we had learned so far. In between Milestone 1 and 3, we did a lot of workbooks and building our knowledge. We learned about the kinetic molecular theory and the atomic theory. We learned about states of matter (gas, solid, and liquid). We also learned about the people who, over the centuries, came up with these theories. The test that we took would show us that we still had a lot more to learn if we were going to complete an accurate particle game/simulator. 

Milestone 4 was where we brought together all of our knowledge and put together a basic plan for what we wanted our game/simulator to look like. In the end, I decided to go with a simulator because it would make for an easy way to take in a lot of information while still including all the requirements. 

Here’s what my basic idea was:

Curricular Competencies:

Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest

I think I did very well on this competency. An example of where I showed this skill was when I went to work with my friends, I still worked efficiently. I still got all my work done on time. Also, the people I was working with helped me grow my ideas and expand them.

Communicate ideas, finding, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies

The best way that I showed this in my project was when I coded my simulated particles to bounce off one another. I feel like this was a way that I represented my particles in a more scientifically accurate way. 

Use logic and patterns (including coding) to solve puzzles and play games

I used this skill to code my entire simulator (which you can find here). I used reasoning and logic to come up with an original code that made my simulator run smoothly. I also used logic to help come up with the best way to make my simulator run and make it look good.

Here’s a tidbit of what my code looks like:

Anyhow, thank you for staying with me through this long post! I hope you enjoyed reading about matter and simulators. I really enjoyed this project because it gave me a new angle on coding and it taught me a lot about the kinetic molecular theory and the atomic theory. This was a big project and a long post, so if I forgot to say something, or something wasn’t clear, please comment!

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. If you missed it, here’s my final project