Welcome back to my blog!
We just finished a project called chemistry coding in Scimatics. The driving question for this project was how can the behaviour of matter be explained by the kinetic molecular theory and the atomic theory. We started the project by creating a mind node of all the questions we had, and since none of us knew anything about the project there we’re lots of questions! Here are all the questions I wrote down at the start of the project:
Completing the text book lessons and worksheets helped me answer the questions I had about the kinetic molecular theory and the atomic theory but for the final result of the project I needed to figure out how to “code”. Our goal for the next of the project was to create a game or a simulator that represents the kinetic molecular and atomic theories and showed what we learnt. We used the Skratch website to create bits of code to make games or simulators. I came up with lots of ideas for how my game could look but when I actually started trying to code in Skratch I realized it would be a lot harder then I thought it would be. I had to “skratch” (😉) all of my ideas and decided to just create a simulator instead. I chose to use H2O particles and show how heat changed the speed the particles would move which would change the state of matter.
This was an individual project but we all still had to communicate and collaborate with each other for help completing our games. Since no one really knew how to use Skratch we had to ask each other for help and share out ideas. I think somthing I could have done differently was to have the temperature rise by 10 degrees instead of by a hundred. I also could have had a temperature limit so you couldn’t go past 100 degrees, because when you do it does not show an accurate depiction of how the particles would move because of the way I coded it.
Copy and past this link into your browser if you would like to check out my simulator!
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/669362094/
This was a fun project to complete and it helped me learn more about the kinetic molecular and atomic theories, elements and atoms and that sometimes your first ideas wont work. Even though I didn’t end up with a very good final mark on my final project it was still a good opportunity to learn bout how to make my future project better.
Thanks for reading. Bye!