Matter… matters?

Hey, welcome back to the blog! Today we’ve got a bit of a different style project as we’ve moved to our fourth quarter subject, scimatics (science and math). This project, Chemistry Coding, was all about molecules, states of matter and coding. The end goal was to make a game or matter simulator that represents the different states of matter. Turns out, matter matters!

To kick off this blog post here’s the mind map I made at the start of this project and added to at the end of it.

Mind Map 6

During this project, I learned a lot about atoms and molecules and how they behave. As all PLP projects are, this project had milestones and stepping stones to learn things. Here are some key milestones that helped me learn a bunch along the way. 

Milestone 2:

Milestone 2 was designing our particles, basically drawing over existing diagrams. We could choose the model so I chose the Bohr Model. I decided to make models of magnesium, titanium, helium, aluminum and oxygen. Here are a couple models for reference:

Milestone 4:

A quick summary of this milestone is we had to create a game programming plan. We had to plan what we wanted our Scratch games to be like. This helped me get a basic idea of what I should include in my game.

Milestone 5: 

Like all my projects, the end milestone has always been on the list of important milestones. Milestone 5, was the final coded game. I didn’t get everything I wanted on it but at least it’s done! Here it is if you want to play it.

Driving question: how can the behaviour of matter be explained by the kinetic molecular theory and atomic theories?

I think that though the behaviour of matter is very difficult to explain as the matter is so small, we can use things like simulators to explain it.

As all projects do, this one has core competencies, in this part of the post I’m going to review how I think I did on them and where I think I excelled on them.

• Questioning and predicting: How can I demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest

I think that I showed this competency best in the project start/end mind map. I had so many questions about this project and I stuck with it until I was able to answer almost all of them by the end of the project.

• Reasoning and analyzing: How can I use logic and patterns (including coding) to solve puzzles and play games?

I think I displayed this competency best in Milestone 4, the game coding plan. In this milestone, I planned everything out and planned how I would code it. This also carried onto milestone 5, the final game where I used lots of logic and patterns to make the game come to life.

• Scientific Communication: How can I communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies?

I think I showed this competency best in Milestone 5, the final Milestone previously mentioned. My tablemates and I communicated our findings in Scratch a lot and helped each other a bunch.

Conclusion

I learned a whole ton in this project and I hope you can see that from my post! Hope you enjoyed it, check in soon for the next project!