blog of week 10/5/15

Sg Chem 2 reflection paper

Obi Ilozor 3rd hour

These two weeks in Sg Chem 2, we did a fair amount of activities and labs. We entered unit 5 with a relative mass lab and a lot of worksheets. Our focus is learning about how atoms and elements interact in fixed ratios but also about the mole, which is a new a complicated term that we focused on. We were also starting to uncover the emperical rule. 

A mole is like a grouping of units. A dozen is twelve, a couple is two, but a mole is 6.022(10^23). Its a monumental number. If we had a mole of basket balls, it would definitely reach the moon and back several times. That is to tell you how small atoms are. The only way we can measure them on a feasible scale is to use this mole system. It is actually called Avagardo's number as well.

We also did activities like the relative mass labs. We did many worksheets of which we white-boarded. It proved that we can count by weighing and massing objects and substances before and after their reactions. This is key in the conversion process to find how many moles an object holds. 

    

As a class, we did a lab involving zinc and chloride. We put a fixed amount of zinc in a beaker, weighed it, and then added a fixed amount of hydrochloride. We let it sit for a day and then came back to it. It was then heated with a Bunson burner and massed after it cooled down. Here are the class results. My table in particular ran into a problem. Our burner during the reaction, stopped burning because the pipeline connected to the gas, fell off. It took quite a while to get the burner up and running again. That is one error that could have affected our results. By massing the end product and the before product, we can tell what happened during the reaction. From what we weigh, we can tell how many moles are in a substance and what it consists of. The most confusing part of this lab is the calculations that you have to make. With this lab came a worksheet that we completed. We were given problems that gave us the mass of a substance and we were to calculate how many moles this substance contained. It took me quite a while to get the hang of things and even still, the concept is hazy to me. 

This blog covers two weeks of material and this was from the previous week. We were still reviewing the law of multiple proportions and how atoms react with other atoms at fixed mass ratios. We did worksheets on this concept and we also had a test. There is no haziness in this concept.

In that same week(two weeks ago) we also learned how to find the ratios of atoms inside a compound just by weighing them. This is very useful because if we were to count manually, we wouldn't get anything done within our short life span. Weighing is pretty much the concept of what we have been doing so far. It is one of the most important parts of chemistry.