Hello readers, and welcome back to another blog post. In this post, I am going to be talking about the scimatics project we just finished, called Chemistry Coding. The final product for this project was a coded and interactive game or simulation that included the Kinetic Molecular Theory and Atomic Theory. I encourage you to play my game right now!

How to play atomic pong: – On the main screen that says “ Atomic Pong” in big letters, you can click the play button to immediately start playing the game, or you can click the turquoise or yellow buttons to learn some more about the atomic theories. – When you choose to play the game, you will have to move the colourful paddle using the right and left arrow keys so that the h2o molecule never hits the blue line at the bottom of the screen. If it does touch the blue line, you will have to restart. Feel free to click the “ back to home page” button at any time. – The game starts off very easy, because in the cold, the atoms move slower. If you get to a score of 5 in the Arctic, then, the game will immediately go to level number #2. Level #2 is a river in the forest, so the atoms move faster then in the Arctic. Finally, if you get a score of over 10 points in level #3, which is the dessert, where the atoms are moving very fast, you win!

At the start of the project, as always, we created a mind map to organize our thoughts and knowledge on the topic. I find that creating mind maps is helpful, but when you do it every single scimatics project, they get a little bit boring to make. Maybe having a different option instead of doing a mind map would make it more interesting to organize our thoughts. Anyway, below is my final mind map on this topic. I answered most of the questions I had at the start of this project.

How can the behaviour of matter be explained by the Kinetic Molecular Theory (KMT) and Atomic Theory?

A key part of our final product was including the KMT and Atomic Theory in our final Scratch games. So we learnt about the behaviour of matter in the different states of matter, and learnt how to explain the composition of atoms. To understand these subjects, we read from textbooks and then did worksheets to test our knowledge. Our teacher also showed us some demonstrations, or we would go over to the actual science lab classroom across the hall and the other Scimatics teacher would do the experiment.

The Kinetic Molecular Theory explains that all matter is made up of small particles. It also explains that the particles exist in empty space and are constantly moving. The particles in solids are vibrating, in liquids they slip and slide past each other, and in gases they move freely in straight lines. The more energy the particles have, the faster they can move and the further apart they can get.

The atomic theory explains that the smallest particle of an element is an atom. Atoms are made up of sub-atomic particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons ( positively charged ) and neutrons ( no charge ) cluster together to form the core of the atom. Electrons ( negatively charged ) move around the nucleus. Our understanding of the atom has been thanks to many previous scientists, who each discovered or created a new model of the atom.

For milestone 2, we had to draw out different atoms or molecules, each using a different scientist’s atom model. Here is mine:

Coding with Scratch

For approximately the next two weeks, we planned and created a Scratch program for our matter simulator or game. Haven’t ever used Scratch? Well, me neither up until now. I think I might’ve done Scratch Jr, in elementary school, but I am no expert. I didn’t no that much about how to code, and clearly, when I asked the teachers questions about it, they didn’t know that much either. I could’ve used an introductory lesson to Scratch but I wasn’t given one, so let’s just say I educated myself with many YouTube videos and I even got some books at the library on how to code in Scratch 🤓. 

 

I deigned and planned a game ⬆️, that was the easy part. You could dream up a super-awesome game idea, but you had to simplify multiple times so that you could actually program your idea. I did not like coding this game. I worked very hard at it, but every-time I’d adjust or add anything to my game, some other part would stop working, and then you had to find a way to fix it. At one point I had the atom to move really quickly in the dessert, and you had to win that level/ get to a score of 10, and then it would broadcast the “yay! You have completed all the levels”. Now as soon as the backdrop switches to the desert, it immediately says that message.

I am very proud of my finished game, and it might not seem like much, but I invite you to take a look inside the project and see how much coding goes behind the simplest game. Again you can click here to play my game.

Reflecting on the curricular competencies

Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

I feel like this project was a little more boring than the other ones we’d done in the past, and for me it seemed like it lasted way longer too. For me, demonstrating a sustained curiosity on the topic of the KMT and Atomic theory was a difficult because it’s hard to picture what atoms look like, when you’ll never be able to see one, because they are the smallest particle of an element. This was a good lesson for me: sometimes you have to adapt your mindset for projects that you’re not that interested in, because there will be projects that I prefer to others. I can say that I used almost all class time for learning without distractions, but I did talk to Hannah and Kira about how their games were going on Scratch. 

Scientific communication: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies.

I was one of the only people in my class to ask Mr. Harris questions or to respond to his questions for us.

When programming my Scratch game, I worked around how could I best include some of my new learnings on the KMT and Atomic theory in my game. Believe it or not, actually making a game trying to include these two theories was really difficult. I worked hard at my game, and chose to make two extra informational pages if you pressed the buttons other than the “play” button. My game has some bugs that need to be fixed, but I think I’ll take a break from coding for a bit. Anyway, I’m really proud of how it turned out, because it ended up beeing quite close to the game I had designed in the beginning 🤩.

Reasoning and analyzing: Use logic and patterns (including coding) to solve puzzles and play games.

I had practically no experience with coding at all before this project. To say that I figured out how to make this game all on my own is quite awesome. I had a little help from the teacher on how to get a sprite in the game with a transparent background, but other then that, I learnt from my own research. My game has severall user controls and is verry interactive, but clear and simple to play.

Thanks so much for reading this post! I’d appreciate if you could try my Scratch game and tell me what you think in the comments below!

Bye!