Week 11 reflection

This was a one day week in chemistry for me, but that one day actually meant a lot. We tested out our homemade thermos. At first it seemed like not much was going to happen, but eventually the temperature started to drop until we started to see a pattern forming. Every minute or so it would drop in increments of .5 degrees Celsius. This pattern stayed true for every measurement except for a few where the temperature stayed the same. This was really interesting to me and I'm anxious to see why this occurred on Monday.

Week 10 Reflection

I never ever understood that there was anything wrong with the word heat. This week proved me wrong. I now understand that heat is non existent, it is really just the presence of energy. I also now know that there is a lot that goes into the definition of temperature. It's also centered around the amount of energy. I also have been proven wrong in my belief that there are all these different "flavors" of energy. There's only one flavor, energy. It does not change forms, but is only stored differently. Energy and the idea of heat also went into our lab on Thursday. We used food coloring so we could see the differences in the stages of melting our water. We were also working on our project throughout the week which was making a thermos. This came with some guidelines which helped them all to be regulated. Ours took a while to make but turned out pretty well I think! (Picture below) this week was full of proving myths wrong and showing us how to rightly change out ideas about these topics.

Week 9 reflection

Week nine already! Time is flying in honors chem! This week was only a three day week for me but it was a short week full of new chemistry! We started the week by turning in and testing our home made barometers (pictured in action below). It was so cool to see how we could so simply make something that actually could be used to measure the weather! We later practice PTVn problems and I actually enjoyed them to some degree, it was cool to put our thoughts to numbers. Our assessment was Friday and I think I nailed some of the problems, but others, not so much. I hope I did okay but after studying up some more this weekend I think I'm ready to reassess if necessary! This week was very short but very substantial in Honors Chemistry!

Week 8 Reflection

At the start of this week, we learned how pressure relates to aspects like temperature, volume, and number of particles. They all became interconnected as we came to realize, and it helped us with the rest of the weeks activities. Wednesday was Halloween, we did an experiment with glow sticks. We tested to see how temperature effected the glow of the glow sticks and I learned a lot on how to preserve my glow stick! And a lot about how the particles in a glow stick move based in different temperatures. At the end of the week we started to learn about barometric pressure and weather and even discussed hurricane sandy. This weekends homework was to make a barometer with a partner and ours is pictures below, it really taught me a lot about how they work, and how pressure effected them!