This term in science we’ve been learning about chemistry and the periodic table. We learned about atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, stuff like that. For our project, we made an animated video about atoms, ionic, and covalent bonds.

We learned a couple different things that I’m gonna list of in point form;

1. Valence shell: the outermost layer of an atom and their electrons. Having a full valence shell make the atom perfectly stable.

2. Ionic bonds: when multiple atoms trade electrons so all members gain a full valence shell. This causes each atom to become either positively charged if they loose and electron, on negatively charged if they gain it. The opposite charges attract one another, causing them to stick.

3. Covalent Bond: when multiple atoms want the same atom(s), so they share it to gain a full valence shell. As neither atom looses or gains an electron, the both stay neutrally charged. Because they are sharing, they stick together.

So, about the assignment.

I was with Kiefer, and we had to animate a video about covalent and ionic bonding, we could choose any atoms we want, but we were told to use a specific family. We used the first couple elements within the “Alkaline-Earth Metals” family, and oxygen.

Calcium and Strontium can’t bond with each other, but they can bond with oxygen, so oxygen was the main character.

One of the requirements was that the video needed to be personalized and unique. While all the other groups had their atoms as characters in their own element-universe where each person was a single atom, the atoms in our story were large masses of pure elements.

Each atom has a different power, and bonding shares these powers between them. Oxygen can talk in any language, calcium can build and repair any machine, Etc.

In our video, humans encounter alien life, the aliens are the atoms. The atoms need to fix their ship, but oxygen is the only atom that can communicate to the humans, so he bonds to calcium so he knows what’s wrong with the ship and can talk to the humans. Because the humans are humans, they capture another oxygen and strontium to study them. Unfortunately, strontium is really strong, and they breakout of the jail cell. They leave the humans with their newly fixed ship, and the humans get what they deserve.

During this project, I learned a lot about the (agonizing slow) process of animating. It took about 10 minutes per frame, and this was a stop motion video. I also learned about ionic and covalent bonds, atoms, elements, and chemistry. While it was boring at times, it was interesting and probably very useful in the future.

At the beginning of this unit, I made a mind map of what I knew about chemistry. I didn’t know a lot, so my mind map was pretty small.

I made another mind map at the end of the unit. I had greatly improved, and the map was much bigger.