For our last science project of term 2 we took another look into chemistry with chemical reactions. There are many different types of chemical reactions and as a way to split us into groups three people were assigned to each reaction type. I was placed in a group with Luca and Maggie to present about decomposition reactions, there were a lot of decomposition reactions that we could pick from but we chose to look at electrosis in water.

This occurs when you run an electrical current through water and splits the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. We decided on doing a keynote presentation with a few experiments. For our main experiment we would separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water using a Hoffman Voltameter.

The gasses would slowly gather in the top of each of the tubes where we could extract them. After we had collected the gas we would then do two separate experiments quickly with each gas. With the hydrogen we would light a match and insert it into the tube from the bottom (because we needed the gas to stay in the tube by floating up) and the the fire would react with the hydrogen and create a small burst of energy as the hydrogen is ignited. For the pure oxygen we would lighten a match and almost completely blow it out then we would lower it into the tube (pure oxygen is heavier than air) and it would re light the match. The second two experiments were more to stretch our the time and to dispose of the hydrogen and oxygen after the first test.

My job in the presentation was to research and talk about the details of how it worked while Luca talked about the history of it and Maggie talked about the skeleton equation.

We had to present in front of a grade 11 chemistry class and this was good and bad. The presentation went well until the very end of my part where I was asked by the teacher about whether the negative ions become hydrogen and the positive ions become oxygen. I knew this at the time but I didn’t hear the question correctly and so I stuttered through it which is something I should definitely fix for next time. 

Another thing that I need to talk about in this post is the curricular competencies. I had to pick 4 that I think represented my work on this project. For the first one I chose to do is the Communication competency specifically number 3 which is to collaborate to plan, carry out, and review constructions and activities. I think that my group did a good job communicating while we were working on the project in terms of what everyone was doing and the planning of the experiment/presentation. The second one I chose was the  creative thinking number 2 which is generating ideas. At the start of the project me and my group memebers spent a lot of time getting ideas together that we would put into our project I think that this gave us a lot more detailed and quality results in the developing phase.