Hello everyone!
This blog post is about my most recent scimatics project ‘Chemistry Coding’. I was really excited for this project because I really like chemistry and I was super excited to learn about it. The end goal of this project was to create a scratch game or simulator that depicts the movement of matter in different states. The driving question for this project was: How can the behaviour of matter be explained by the kinetic molecular theory and atomic theory?
For the begging of this blog post I’m going to talk to you about the curricular competencies and where I think I did well and where I think I can improve (ect…)
Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. All class time is used efficiently for learning without distractions.
Like usual I think I excelled at this competency. I believe this because when I’m in class my brain kind of has his switch thats like “do you want to finish this at home? No you don’t so do it now instead of later.” And that is one of the times I heed my brain’s questions. I think even though I excel at this competency there’s always room for improvement and I think an area I need to improve in is when I feel like I can’t do something or somethings not working I give up and therefore waste class time.
Scientific communication: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies. Several different atoms/ molecules, different states of matter, and particle motion are represented in the finished product. A historical model of the atom is chosen and implemented.
I think I accomplished this competency because I showed 4 different types of atomic models (even one we didn’t learn about in class) and I showed 3 of the states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas) and I believe I showed how the particles move in those states well. An area I could improve for this competency is that I could have made the movement of my particles between the states a little more dramatic than they were.
Reasoning and analyzing: Use logic and patterns (including coding) to solve puzzles and play games. An interactive Scratch coded matter simulator or game is created with logical conditions and functional user controls.
I think my scratch game was definitely interactive because you had to press buttons in order to change certain things and you could make the temperature go up and down and you could decide which atom you’d like to play. I think I could have improved how chunky the graphic were because sometimes the game would glitch a bit and stop functioning.
Alright my speal about the core competencies is over and now its all about how I created my game and everything else we did in this project.
How did we get to the end goal? Well I’m here to show you.
We started off by talking about the project and getting to know all the details of the and project and we created a MindNode with all our questions like we do with all other scimatics projects here’s mine: 
Then the next step was to gain some knowledge by doing workbooks but I doubt you want to see that so I’ll show you something a little more interesting, we identified gemstones we tried to figure out what the gemstones mr gross brought in were here are my lab report results:
And now let’s move onto the next step of the building knowledge phase which was milestone 2. Milestone 2 was about creating atomic models for our game/simulator. In this milestone we had to decide which elements we wanted to do for our sim/game I decided to do Carbon, Iodine, Antimony, and oxygen. Part of the assignment was that we should use at least 3 diffferent particles (molecules or atoms) and at least 3 different types of models. Here’s the ones I did:
The last step for the building knowledge phase was taking a test and unfortunately I was away that day so I did the test not in class and unfortunately did the wrong one but that was ok because the test was about showing your knowledge on the subject and I did that just not 100% correctly.
The next phase of the project path is develop and critique and for the first part of this stage we created a programming plan which included your entire plan for your sim/game just without the coding. Here’s mine:
Now before we moved onto creating the game we did and experiment (well mr gross did it because playing with fire is not safe for eighth graders) and I know what your thinking. Sydney why was you teacher playing with fire? Well since we had just comeback from spring break he was like “to get you back into chemistry were gong to do an experiment” but it was more like he was doing the experiment and we just asked and answered questions. The experiment was we were trying to figure out what the liquid and what the gas our teacher was using here’s a little clip of the experiment:
Unfortunately when creating my simulator I wasn’t able to stick exactly to my plan but that’s life, sometimes things don’t go exactly as planned and you just have to adapt as best you can. Anyway on that note the final step to the develop and critique stage was our finished sim/game. I decided to create a simulation of how to the different particles move around when their in different stages of matter and I think I showed early well. So without further ado here is my finished scratch game, enjoy! (Click the green flag to start)
Here’s my completed MindNode:
This project was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to do more chemistry in grade 9.
Thanks for reading -Sydney🙃