Science experiments have been my favourite part of science this year, so when we were told that we could make an experiment of our choice, I was more than excited to do so. My class was split into pairs to either do an experiment project or an animation video about different chemicals combining. Both of these projects sounded interesting, but I was very excited to conduct an experiment of my choice so I decided to do the experiment project.

My partner for this project was Will, and we had a few different ideas for what kind of experiment we wanted to do. First, we thought that we could test for helium gas using a balloon, but we decided that we should stick to liquid chemicals to test. The next idea we had was to test different kinds of water, but we didn’t know what we wanted to test for. We thought that we could test weather the ocean water in the cove is more acidic than tap water. This was a great first idea for an experiment, but we wanted to add more variables to test. Finally, we came to the conclusion to test for the amount of carbon dioxide in soda water, tap water, and sea water.

Once our ideas were checked by the teacher, we needed to come up with an experiment lab template that expressed our plans for the project. Will and I got together to write our pre-lab notes about the project. This included how much soda water, tap water, ocean water, bromthymol blue, and calcium hydroxide we needed. We split up the work and the supplies that we needed so that we could both be ready by the day we planned to do the experiment in front of the class.

On the day of the experiment, we noticed that the soda water that I brought in was flat, so it probably wouldn’t work in the experiment, but we still tried. We tested the calcium hydroxide in the three samples first, and if the waters had carbon dioxide, they would turn a cloudy white. Unfortunately, this part of the experiment didn’t work, leaving the water samples as clear as when the started. Will and I didn’t loose hope though, we really wanted the second part of the experiment to work.

When we put the bromthymol blue into the beakers of water, we were expecting the soda water to turn yellow. We noticed that the soda water turned the most yellow, but it was still a green shade. We decided that the reason it didn’t turn yellow was because the soda water was flat, so we agreed to try again with a new bottle of soda water. The tap water ended up having more acid (carbon dioxide) in it than the ocean water did. This surprised us because we both predicted that the ocean water would be more acidic than the tap water.

In the next class, we brought in new soda water and tried that part of the experiment again. This time, the bromthymol blue turned the soda water a bright yellow! That means that the soda water definitely had the most acid in it, proving that part of our hypothesis to be correct.

Now that this unit is over, I have looked back on the scientific notes that I have learned. In the beginning of this unit, I made a mind map to show what I already knew about chemistry, which wasn’t much. I also made one more mind map to show the growth in learning that I have made since my science project.

My first mind map:

My second mind map: