Our first science unit of the year was all about matter. We covered a lot in the first few classes that had to do with all of the vocabulary and what matter was. After completing all of that we moved onto a super fun mini project.
Whatever Floats your Boat
The challenge of this mini project was to build a high capacity boat, that would carry the greatest amount of pennies. However we were only allowed to use one sheet of aluminium foil, ten toothpicks, 30cm of transparent tape, and scissors. Grace, my partner, and I started right away on brainstorming a plan. We went with the idea of making a long flat canoe-like boat, but after our first trial we realized that wasn’t going to work as it only held 22. We then folded over the paper so it was thicker and made it more compact, this worked way better so the only construction we had left to do was fixing holes and minor flaws. Our final result was 34 which was around the middle of the scores.
The Mighty Molecular Movies
The next section was all about the Kinetic Molecular Theory. we learned about all of the different states of matter and what has to happen in order for one to change into another. These processes are freezing, melting, vaporizing, deposition, sublimation, ionization, and relxation, however we primarily stayed away from the last two as they didn’t have very much information on them through research. Our assignment was to create a mini movie explaining each of these processes.
Grace and I chose to be partners again because we like working together and we work well too. First we decided what we would show in the video for each process and discussed a day to come to my house to film. Once that was finished I began editing and Grace started writing the script. Recording the voiceover was a funny experience because we went outside to get silence, however we didn’t realize other people were filming outside so there is definitely some background noice throughout the clips.
The Viscosity Lab
Our last project for the unit was about viscosity. We learned about resistance, and particle movement which was actually really interesting. The idea of the project was to see what happens to the viscosity of a fluid when heated. We did this by heating oil up and then pouring it out, while being timed. We would compare multiple trials of this to come up with a definite answer. Each partnership, I was with Aedan, had a temperature for their oil so we could compare times between heat. Aedan and I had 11 degrees Celsius. Once the fun part of experimenting was over we got back to our worksheet to show our data.
This was a super fun unit because of all the projects and quirky things we got to do. I love hands on work so when given these it was awesome. I also learned a lot but it didn’t feel like something I had to learn, it just felt like experimenting with my friends.
Leave a Reply