Chemistry can be one of the most difficult parts of science 10, and for me, at the start, it defiantly was. At the beginning of the unit I had a brief understanding of some of the most basic concepts of chemistry, and I didn’t even know how many of the concepts worked. During the first classes of the unit we were instructed to create a mind map of what we already knew about chemistry, this is mine:

 

As you can see I had mentioned atoms and reactions and other simple concepts like that, but I hadn’t expanded further than the first few lines. In the first classes of PLP science we were introduced to our project thesis: How can chemical reactions be used to identify the composition of a substance? We had some time to think about the question and then we put it to the side until later into the unit. Personally I had no idea how to answer the question, I barely even knew what the question meant. To help us understand how to answer the question better we were assigned questions from the chemistry textbook which we worked on for the majority of the first part of the unit.

First we worked on learning about matter, which I understood pretty easily. The hardest part was learning how to write chemical formulas and chemical symbols for elements. Then we worked on the atomic theory which included Bohr Diagrams. I understood this really easily because I had excelled in this before. Then, one of the hardest parts, the Periodic Table. Here we worked on classifying the elements in their sections on the periodic table. After this we did an experiment where we explored if an element could be separated from a compound. This was a lot of fun, and not only did we learn a lot about reactions and the separation of elements, but the end lab write up and design. Here’s mine:

 

The next week was spent learning about compounds, atoms and ions. This was really hard to learn because we had to remember how to transfer and organize an elements electrons, protons and neutrons. We then learned about chemical bonding, the types of compounds and how to make/write them. Now it was time to move onto the project. In order to answer the question we had to learn about reactions. We spend a long time researching and doing questions on how reactions work, the type of reactions and how to write and balance chemical equations. We ended off the textbook portion of the unit with one final lab:

 

So now we where finally onto making our final project, my Partener Kyle and I decided to design and perform a chemical reaction experiment that will clearly identify the presence of an element or compound in an object/material/mixture. Kyle and I decided to take a different approach to answering this question… this was our project design we made:

 

First we researched about the Cocaine Wipes, we found out that the wipes where made out of Cobalt (II) Thiocyanate. We also found out that the wipes turn blue when they come in contact with Cocaine (chemical formula = C17H21NO4). We couldn’t find out what the reaction was behind the wipes turning blue with cocaine but we know that it is because of the cobalt.