Science is one of the courses that is part of our PLP classes at school so we learn it nearly the same way. We do many projects and a lot of little work in class that will help us with the projects. In science this term we have been focusing a lot on chemical reactions and equations. This was something that I had never done before and I was not very excited to see what this unit would have in store for us. What I did not expect was that it would be very interesting and a hard thing to learn. We also had a chance in this unit to make our own reaction and show it to the class in a presentation. All of this lead up to the post that you are reading right now.
At the beginning of the unit we created a mind map that showed what we knew at the time and as you can imagine there was not a lot of good information on that mind map as none of us had done much of this stuff before. This unit was a pretty large one and we covered everything from the periodic table to chemical elements to making our own reactions.
The periodic table was something that we had done work on before but not many people really remembered much about it. Learning about the different metals and gases that are in the table was a huge part of the unit and we couldn’t move on until we knew what we were doing with this.
Studying protons, neutrons and electrons was the next part of the unit that we would have to understand. Knowing what made these different and how they worked together was a key part in understanding the elements and how they go together. Using things like Lewis diagrams greatly helped us in understanding how elements are formed together and how all of the electrons, protons and neutrons fit into them.
In the next part of the unit we started to prepare for our own reaction by learning about different chemical reactions and what they are. We studied different reactions that are very common for people to do and then we started to design our own reaction with our partner. Using the things that we already learned we chose some reactants that we would want to use and started researching.
For our project we decided to test different types of water for carbon dioxide. Me and my partner collected soda water, tap water and ocean water. Using calcium hydroxide and bromthymal blue we tested for the carbon dioxide and if there was acid in the water. During our presentation in front of the class we had a small mishap with our soda water. Turns out the one that we were going to used was flat and had next to no carbon in dioxide in it.
So it was decided that we would redo the experiment with the soda water next class. The other two waters did not react much with either of the products that we were using. The second reaction we did with the soda water was much more successful. It reacted very well with the bromthymal blue and did exactly what we thought it was going to do. However, it did not react with the calcium hydroxide which was very surprising to us.
I learned a lot in this unit and I was very surprised by how much fun making the reactions can be. I’m not sure how much of this I will remember but I really hope that we will get to continue to do things like this throughout the rest of the year and the rest of high school. Learning things like ten periodic table and different diagrams will help a lot for furniture tests and assignments and I hope that what we learned during this unit will help me a great deal in the future.