Period 1 Accelerated Chemistry Blog 1

During the first full week of Chemistry we have been doing many labs to not only get to know our classmates, but also learn things at the same time. The first thing we did was get put into a random group by having different terms that were all related in some way. We then built boats in these groups. My group tried to keep our boat price very cheap. In doing this, we did not make a good spot to hold our pennies, causing our boat to sink. The next thing that we did was a mass and change lab. Here we did a series of 7 different tests. Each of these tests involved doing something with the original material and mixing, burning, or melting it. Taking the mass at the beginning and end. My favorite test in this lab was heating the steal wool over the Bunsen burner. I had  never used a Bunsen burner before so I thought it was cool. Here is a picture of Tyler standing by there Bunsen burner.

 

What we found with the masses was that most stayed the same. The only two experiments that had mass changes were the heating of steal wool and the Alka-Seltzer tablet in water. These had mass changes because they were chemical changes. The ones that had no change in mass were physical changes. This led us to our next lab named chemical and physical changes in matter. Here we did 5 different experiments that all had either a physical change, or a chemical change. The main difference between a physical and a chemical change is that you create a totally new product. Where as in a physical change you just you don't. The last thing we did was compare mL to cm^3. We did this by marking a line onto a container. We then measured the volume of the hen we measured how many mL of water filled to our line. mL to cm^3 were almost equal in our classes test. I did not know that this was true until Friday. That is everything we did this last week.