Hello everyone!

I just completed a project on atoms and the kinetic theory. We were doing a project on a program called scratch, a simple way to code. We could create a game or a simulator that includes two different types of atoms and different states of matter.

I decided I was going to create a game at first, because I thought it would be more interactive and something that would be fun to play. After I had started to create the game, I thought that it would be better to create a simulation because it shows all of the atoms and states of matter in one simple way that is easy to take in.

In the beginning of the project we were creating a mind map on what we already know about atoms and questions we had. This was to show that we could use questioning and predicting in our projects. After we shared all we knew we started to learn more because it was clear that we didn’t know a lot. We were doing experiments on density and learning how to get the density a certain object. One bigger experiment we did was getting the density of a gemstone and identifying similar looking stones. I think this was a interesting and fun way of learning the density because it was something we could do on our own at our own speed and really look into it.

Once we had learned about density and how to get the density of something we started preparing for our final project. We were drawing atoms in different models from years previous. These two models were going to be used in our games in what ever way we wanted. The skill was communication because we were communicating our ideas. At first I didn’t have a very good idea of what I wanted to do. I only really realized what I wanted to do after I had just started. It was then I changed my project from a game to a simulator. This is a photo of what I was coding during the project,

I was creating a simulator that showed how when atoms get heated up they move faster and when cool air comes in they move slower. I had to code this so that it included all the requirements and actually worked, it needed to move certain things when you click a button. The actual coding part was really fun for me because it is something I’m interested in. Sometimes there would be parts of the coding that I was confused with, and had to create my own blocks that sent out a command I had created. There wasn’t always the blocks I needed and at first I didn’t know you could create your own so I kept trying different things that weren’t working. I think using block coding was fun though it makes things easier and it was cool to use it for a change.

Here it is if you want to try it out!

 

During this project I learned a lot about atoms and density, I learned there are different models of the atom the were later revised and updated. In this project there was always something new to learn or to add to my project.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

– Albert Einstein