Science with Scratch

Hey y’all, Max here.

The Chemistry coding project has just concluded, and I can honestly say that this was my favourite project in scimatics this year, or even in PLP as a whole. 

The main idea for this project was to make a game in Scratch that showed and demonstrated the Kinetic Molecular Theory. I was glad when I heard we were going to be using Scratch, because I have previous experience with the coding program, which is maybe why I decided to make such an ambitious project. I think I best showed the first curricular competency here, which is Questioning and Predicting . 

Before we started getting down to all the wrk we would do for the next 2 weeks, we made a mind map like we usually do before projects in scimatics. I wrote down all my ideas, questions, and answers I had, which wasn’t very many.

I had a basic idea when I first started working on this. I saw that many of my peers were working on simulation-like games, which really didn’t look appealing to me. I wanted to create something. Bigger, and more interesting. That’s how I started on Sepaus’s science adventure, a very basic side-scroller featuring my colleague Sepaus as the protagonist. I included a hub world of sorts for the player to move right and left in, just because I felt that a game with no introduction would be slightly confusing for the player to just jump into. ( I would have made a 3D environment if I had more time ).

As for the actual games that demonstrate the Kinetic Molecular Theory, I decided to make two, instead of the standard one game/ simulation that everyone else was doing. Another thing I did was give my game an arcade-ish theme towards the actual games, thus allowing me to rip off real arcade titles. Originally I was aiming towards three games, but I had to lower it to two after I realized that I didn’t really have enough time to finish my third game. This is probably an example of competency two, which is Scientific Communication.   

I would say that development throughout the entire Scratch project went rather smoothly, although I did spend 2-4 hours at a time working on it. The games were moderately difficult to make. My first game is a shooting game, and my second game is a trivia game. My third game was supposed to be a Pokémon clone, but about an hour into development, I realized I had no idea how to make a Turn-based RPG. All my games combined make up competency three, Reasoning and Analyzing, especially the gameplay. 

Well, I’ve pretty much covered everything about my game, and about the project. The only thing left is the driving question. This time around it’s: 

How can the behaviour of matter be explained using the kinetic molecular theory and atomic theory?

I have thought about this, and after over analyzation I think that atomic theory explains matter and its components better than the kinetic molecular theory, for a few reasons. The kinetic molecular theory uses gases as points to explain properties and behaviours, while the atomic theory is more broad, and focuses on atoms as a whole. To simplify, I believe that the characteristics and behaviour of matter are best described using the atomic theory, but I think that you would need to know both the kinetic molecular theory and the atomic theory to fully understand how matter works.

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