Chemical Reactions

"A chemical reaction is a process that leads to the transformation of one set of chemical substances to another."

You know a chemical reaction is happening when there is a: color change, heat change, there is gas produced, or a precipitate formed.

The parts of a chemical reaction are reactants and products.  General types of reactions are: synthesis, decomposition, single displacement, double displacement, and combustion.

Trends In The Periodic Table

The difference between a group and a period is that a group is also called a family, and it runs in columns. All those elements share the same characteristics.  Periods run in rows.  The periodic table is organized by an elements' atomic number, with 18 columns and 7 rows.

Flame Test Lab

I wasn't here when my class completed the flame test lab, so instead, I looked it up online.

"A flame test is an analytic procedure used in chemistry to detect the presence of certain elements, primarily metal ions, based on each element's characteristic emission spectrum. The color of flames in general also depends on temperature."

A flame test involves the elements on the periotic table, and what makes up the elements.  From what I've seen online, all the elements basically have a color and when one does the experiment with the elements, it causes all the flames to turn different colors.

A flame test is used to determine the identity or possible identity of a metal or metalloid ion found in an iconic compound.  It's used to visually determine the identity of an unknown metal of an iconic salt based on the characteristic color (like what I said before, all the elements have their own colors), then the salt turns the flame a different color on the Bunsen burner.

Law of Conservation Mass

1. Color changed, it thickened, and produced a gas

2. It changes with the changes with make to the reactant.

3. The mass is not conserved because with each experiment and each time we tried it, it was a different mass every single time therefore it was wasted because it was never the same.

Scientific Skills Lab - 1

1)      The water turned blue because we stirred vigorously after about five minutes after putting the copper chloride in the water.

2)      When solutions are made, different results could come out.  A solution is whenever you dissolve something into a liquid, in this case, the water and the copper chloride.

3)      I think what happened is that when the aluminum reacted with the copper chloride, the copper chloride was eating away at the aluminum, forcing it to change into a copper form.

4)      When the nitric acid reacted with the precipitate, I think what happened is that the nitric acid made the copper turn into a liquid, forcing it to bubble and become clear, like the nitric acid was cleaning or filtering the copper precipitate.

5)      The solution turned blue at the end of the experiment because it was bubbling into the blue after we put in the nitric acid.

Oreo Cookie Lab

Adriana Santos, Pentucket HS.

Lab conducted on September 12, 2013.

Oreo Cookie Lab

Students measured the filling in three types of Oreo cookies to determine if filling amounts matched advertising.  My group's hypothesis was: each cookie will have different measurements and different masses because they all have different amounts of fillings in them. Some students did it differently, but my group peeled the filling off of the Oreo and weighed it in the Triple Beam Balance.  We took the filling off of the original Oreo, the Double Stuffed Oreo, and the Mega Stuffed Oreo.  We weighed them all and subtracted the weight from the paper towel they were with and all that.  Then when we found the mass of all three of our Oreo's, we compared.  

Original Oreo - 11.1g

Double Stuf - 11.3g

Mega Stuf - 17.7g

The comparison with the original and original = 1.

The comparison with the double stuffed and original = 1.01.

The comparison with the mega stuffed and original = 1.59.

The advertisement that the Oreo's use for the original, double stuffed, and mega stuffed aren't 100% of what they say they are, because there is not that much of a difference.  But yes, there is a difference between the filling in all 3 of the Oreo's, but not as much as the Oreo company says there is.

Work This Week

In physical science, we did 3 "Do Now's" and a bowling ball lab, and a gummy bear lab.  The first "Do Now" this week was finding the mass and volume of 3 items that were on the front table: a dice, a block, and some metal.  The second one was finding the volume of pure solid copper.  The last "Do Now" was to explain what a "variable" in a science experiment is, which had a few different answers.

The Gummy Bear Lab we did was fun.  My group with Colin had a red gummy bear, the length of 2 centimeters, the height of 1 centimeter, and the width of 1 centimeter.  The volume was 1.3 mL and the mass of the gummy bear was 2.34 g.  The final density was 1.95 g/mL.  We let our gummy bears soak in water over night, to see the difference.  My hypothesis was that I thought that if we left the gummy bear in water, the gummy bear would get all mushy and lose some density, then float to the surface because the gummy bear would probably sink.  Then the next day when we checked our gummy bears, they were completely dissolved in the water, and the water turned a lighter color of whatever color the gummy bear was.  We think that they dissolved completely because it was so hot over night that they just melted because it was in the 90's F°.  We might try the lab again by putting the gummy bears in over night on a cooler night to see the actual outcome.

Why Study Science?

Why I Took This Course ...

I took this course because I wasn't able to make it into chemistry.  Now that I'm in this class, I want to learn chemistry and physics together in one year in a more simple matter.  Also, I wanted to take this class because if I pass, I don't have to take a year of chemistry then a year of physics.

I hope to gain knowledge of chemistry and physics by taking this course, and pass so I'll technically be ahead of my class in science.

I want to understand science better because I've never been good at it, and physics looks like it's really interesting, so I want to understand the labs and experiments.