Week 22: Constant Ratios in Chemistry.

In the past week, our Chemistry class has focused upoon a certain  chemical ratios that are constant undrr different situtations. This means that Water will ALWAYS be 2 Hydrogen molecules and 1 Oxygen atom because of Constant ratios. This means that if a certain chemical is made up of these ammount of atoms, theratio of one atom to another will not change, ever. Watter can only be 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atoms, if the ratio is not 2:1 then it is not chemically water. H2O2 is in fact Hydrogen Peroxide

We proved the existance of thses constant when we  performed electrolysis with our own mini kits, similar to the illustration above, but without the ballons to collect gas, we sinply had test tubes. After pouring water and an anti corrosion agent ( that stung bad when it was upon my hands) we began to  crank the Genacon and send positive charges to one pole and negative charges to the other pole ( we unfortunately did not know which pole was which, but the above illustration can shed) some light upon which pole is which,) and  we began to ( slowly) sepertate the oxygen and hydrogen out of the wateer and into separate  test tubes. We ended up with 1 ml of Hydrogen and 1/2 ml of Oxygen, while the ammount of gas our group had collected was small, the ratio of 2:1 was the same among all the groupsi n the classroom.


We further proved that ther was 2 times more hydrogen   than oxygen when found out how many moles per gram of hydrogen and water there were, finding the ratio was still 2 to 1. While the mass of Oxygen dwarfed Hydrogen,  Hydrogen was still 2x more abundant when collected from electrolysis proving that there is a constant ratio for chemical substnaces NO MATTER WHAT. If it's  H2O its water, and nothing else.

Week 20 Reflection: Week of the Mole!

Happy sunday! It's ChemTeam  Reflection Time! Instead of  my normal blogging format ( which i learned is not a good grade on the new grading scale) I wanna focus on the principal we focusedo n the last wekk before break : The Mole!. I'm not  talkign about the creatures that dig in the ground i mean the magical number that  is alo called Avagadro's Number ( for the scientist who kickstarted reasearch that later lead to the discovery of the mole) is  6.022 times  10 to the 23rd power! This number is a specific number of particles so 1 mole of ANY Substance has 6.022 times  10  to the 23rd power  particles within it. In class we calculated that there arent even 1 mole of living cells on earth! And also  there  has not even been one mole of rice produced yet!And if there was 1 mole of sand on earth, every inch of the surface would have 75 meters of sand on top of it! Molar mass is how many moles are  within a certain weight of a substance expressed by the formula: G/ 1MOL.

Having been so highly interested in this new concept, I went hope and told my parents the more interesting facts i learned about it, as they already knew what a mole was. In fact my mom said they had T-shirts from their chemisty class in high school that had Moles on them, the furry ones but it was a paly on words! I did find a picture of my father in his Mole shirt but unfortunately  My uncle  had decided to wear scary short 80's shorts in the picture so it is unfit for the internet! I wanted to understand Moles further so i went onto the internet and found a video i found quite helpful, basically summing up out lesson on friday!

In the Video  the speaker explains that the  number of Atoms of 1 mole of ANY Element has 6.022 time 10 to the 23rd atoms. Another interesting point the speaker made  was that if you have1 mole of NaCl the Molar weight  is the molar weight of Na and the weight of Cl  TOGETHER! I thought that was really helpful and interesting! I'm really excited to use moles in chemistry now!

Week 19 ( attempt number two)

 The blogger app ate my first draft of this post!  I hate technology sometimes, I'd rather be a ludite, honestly, but alas I was born in a time where i grew up with computers, i didn't see them  come into being.

Week 19

Happy Sunday!

Unfortunately we had no school on fiday due to imcliment weather ( YAY!) and so it is acceptable to assume we have an assesment monday. ( Not as excited about this part.)

This past week we started applying Dalton's theory of diatomic molecules and finding out which elements were diatomic ( such as Hydrogen and Chloride) and  which were not. The theory is useful in figuring out chemical equations if you know which molecules contain two atoms instead of one. We conducted an experiments this week  to prove if Cloride is a diatomic element and we mixed hydrocloric acid with zinc in a flask, and as a result clollected some combustable gas and water vapor. The oxygen in the air reacted with the hydrogen in the air creating water vapor and the other byproduct of this chemical reaction was zinc oxide.

Week18

11:25 pm

Finally back into the daily grind and it feels.. refreshing? For the most part. I'm chemistry I feel we are finally shifting from simple basic ( and fundemental) principles to my complex theories and really getting into chemistry. I honestly believed that some idea we learned in first semester wouldmt actually apply to the chemistry I was hopine we would get to do but this week really showed just how the baclinga are.connected.to chemistry nd how they support it.

We assessed for the first time in over two weeks on Friday and I felt quite confident, even with the question pertaining to Daltons theories upon constant molecular ratios within a substance or compound.

I an quite excited for this new semester. I know I am going to rock at chemistry! Not that I. Didn't before but still!

Week 16 : the crunch time before midterms begins

Our first challenge of this was to seperate sand salt birdseed and iron filings. This was so we could exploit the properties of matter. Our attempt did work in the end but it took several tries. We discussed the different properties of water and ethonol and discussed how we could tell which was which. Then upon Friday we touched the surface of the process called diffusion and we seperated ethonol from water and lit it on fire. I hope this week is as just as exciting

Late nite Blog #15

Yes I should.be asleep but  guess who is not.and decided to write the blog.reflection this late. Well let's.take a trip back to yesteryear to when week 15 took place. That week we.made soaps in class! Yay! We all used soap bases to make our soaps but each soap was different, because we all received different out comes. Margo and I.made.delightful lemongrass tea.soaps which looked very nautral and organic.although we had a. Few problems with bubbles and  the soap being a bit mushy. Overall I saw the project was a success, bubbles or otherwise . With all the presentations, it took us.till Friday to get them done and then on Friday we ( attempted) ice cream in a bag. I worked with Chris and eve though we poured a lot of salt to break up the ice particles and cause the salt particles to suck energy from the surrounding air causing the. Ice to become.super cold, we got milk shake consistency, oh well :/ it was still my favorite project of the year !

W33k 12: It really doesn't feel like 12 weeks

W33k 12

I sit writing with my note book  next to me and i;m still trying to grasp how we've all been a aprt of ChemT3am for 12 WEEKS! 12!!!  I have no sense of rtime, os it still feels like school started just last week.

This week in Chem Team was a bit....  fast paced. I felt like all the information thrown at us a bit too quickly, especially the concept of specific heat (although it was about the only thing we actually worked on, ) I was a bit lost when Mr. Picar handed out the worksheets, even though we had discussed what specific heat was the day before. Nobody wanted to work on wednesday and i kinda felt the lack of motivation getting to me.

Moday had been a long, almost heated, discussion of how heat is NOT!  energy and that energy can  be transfered like  music files.  The analogy  confused me forthe most part,  but i  understood it.

Tuesday was where you actually taught us the meaning of  specific heat which is how many joules of energy would it take to raise 1 gram of a substance by 1 degree celcius.concspt seemed a little crazy ( What are we gonna use this for??) but i got the basics down.

Wednesday was where i felt  like i was drowning in science formulas that made no sense to me,  the answers i kept on getting i kept being  very far off from the correct answer, which made me quite fustrated, i hate equations, i usually forget order of operations, which was what had happened.

By friday i felt confident enough to use my skill of applying specific heat. Lets hope i did good on the mini assesment we took on fiday.