What is up BrOS? Get it? Oh I know, I know, all my chemistry jokes are bad becuase all the good ones Argon! 

Welcome to Chemistry Stories, behind the scenes. How did I make this video? Well thats what I’m going to go through with you today. I’m going to talk about the curricular competencies we used for this project, and my improvements and what I could improve for the future! 

Believe it or not, I created this animation using…. EXPLAIN EVERYTHING! Yeah I know. All of the PLP kids despise this app because it has deleted projects countless times, and glitches almost regularly. But since its updated, its actually been pretty good for me! I learned all its tools in Maker class, and used them in Scimatics for this animation project. 

Our project overview is above and our driving questions was “How do atoms and ions act like characters?”. Let me tell you something about atoms, I don’t trust them, I heard they make up everything! *badum tssss* Aside from the jokes, we started with the basics, learning what the heck atoms and ions are! We did worksheets upon worksheets just to get the concept in our heads, each getter a bit more challenging than the next. I wanted to go one step further so I sat in my living room and searched up ions, what they do, metals, I even dipped my toes into the concept of organic metals! To me, this demonstrates our first competency, Questioning and Predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or a problem of personal interest. 

Since we are speaking of competencies, our second competency, Communicating: Formulate physical or mental theoretical models to describe a phenomenon. My evidence for accomplishing this competency is the Mind-Map that we created at the start of this project. 

We started with a mind map and we ended with a mind map. Compare my project-start mind map with my project-end mind map!

Processing and Analyizing: construct, analyze and interpret graphs (models, diagrams, ANIMATIONS) Our third and last competency. I demonstrated this through our animation! I have to say my animation skills through Explain Everything, improved drastically. I’m using this app for humaties projects, WILLINGLY! Thats a first. But the information going into this animation was very important. We had learnt about ionic bonding, and covalent bonding and showed this through the ionic bonding of Carbonate and Gold (II) and the covalent bonding of Hydrogen and Chlorine! I posted the video at the top but if you want to watch it again here it is. 

Now that I’ve told you about my competencies, and how I demonstrated them, I received feedback on how Mr. Gross thought I did. 

Do you guys agree? I’m pretty happy with my grade and I’m really proud of the outcome. It was better than I expected!

Now lets end with a chemistry joke, completely out of context and uncalled for. 

~Malaika