The New Phineas And Ferb

The new year brought a completely new topic in science. After coming off a much needed break we accelerated in to our Chemistry unit. We began by creating a mind map of everything we know about chemistry. Honestly, I didn’t know much right off the top of my head, so my mind map consisted of mainly questions, however most of my peers were in the same situation.

The first thing we learnt was how ions and atoms act like characters. This helped break down the content and make it easier to understand. We talked about the different roles they play in the world of chemistry and how they coincide with one another. We were then given the brief on our project; Create a video depicting how atoms and ions act like characters. This was something I was interested in, I love making videos, and it was nice to be making one in a small group of just two, instead of a larger group like we did in Humanities.

 

As much as we were eager to get going, we didn’t know enough to create a descriptive and informative video, so with the due date in the back of our heads, we continued to expand our knowledge in class through various in class assignments to help us build our understanding of chemistry. To help us get an overview of all the elements, we watched a crash course video on the periodic table of elements. We discovered the purpose of atomic mass, number of protons, charge, and we also learnt the various ‘families’ of elements and by the end of the class we decided which family we wanted to feature in our video about atoms.

After understanding the basics we moved in to some tricker stuff; Bohr Models. This is where we started to implement to rely on our knowledge of the elements in order to be able to create a Bohr model for an element by knowing only its name. This proved to be a challenge in the beginning but eventually I figured it out. From there we merged in to Covalent bonding as we needed to understand how atoms bond and create compounds, in order to create our videos. We also learned about Ionic bonding, and more importantly the difference between the two and why there are different kinds of bonding. It was important to be capable of tackling a question whether or not the atoms were made up of metals or non-metals. All this and much more was described in detail via both iPad and textbook.

This was an activity we did to further our understanding of the role of each part of an atom. 

After we finished up with bonding, it was full steam ahead right in to creating our videos. By now we had already created our first sketches of ideas and characters, so it was time to put it all together. My partner, Luca OG, came up with a really good idea that we based our story off of. He just threw out an idea and clearly it was the perfect thing to do it ended up being the storyline of our video.

The idea was to have it so a group of brothers, who were all Rubidium atoms, wanted to expand their guitar company (Luca’s idea would work with any business we just chose guitars because Luca is in to playing guitar). They wanted to hire a man – a Phosphorus atom – who is part of a different guitar company with three other men – three Fluorine atoms. This was the Ionic bond. I won’t describe the whole story but basically, the Rubidiums convinced the Phosphorus to come and join their guitar company, this was the Covalent bond. This all made sense because of the charges and the number of protons/neutrons, etc. the elements have. If you want to see the full video here it is:

I believe this project was extremely successful. Me and Luca OG worked very well with each other, communicating in perfect harmony so he could supply the drawings I needed when I needed them to edit. Our video included all the necessary scientific material, however we could have included a little more to achieve a perfect rating. Our video shows a lot of time, effort and creativity, as well as encompassing the learning we underwent throughout the term.