Hello and welcome back to another one of my blogs. Today I’ll be talking about my recent Scmatics project ‘Chemistry Coding’. The start of this project I was nervous and not excited. I didn’t know much about chemistry or coding at all. Eventually at the end I started to build a understanding around it.

The first project we did to show our understanding of everything was on my favourite app ‘MindNode’! After the whole project we added to this exact oneAs you can see I have learned some new things. I love MindNode because you can connect random ideas in a orderly fashion and it looks good. In this MindNode you can see what I have learned and how my thoughts have expanded.

 

Gemstone ID challenge

A experiment we did in this project which I found very fun was the gemstone ID challenge. We learned how to identify gem stones just by dropping them in some water. The gemstones take up a certain amount of space in the water and once you get the weight and density you can use a chart to calculate what kind of gemstone it is. Hannah and I got into partners then got the supplies we needed. We then filled up the tube and measured it. Then weighted the rock and put it in and measured the water again. Once we got all the calculations we did the math and found out the type of stone it was. Here is the Lab write up we made for it:

 

After a few YouTube videos and many textbook pages we finally started the main and final part of the project. It was time to code!

We made a account on scratch and everyone started to make an idea for their game. Here is my programming plan:

The aim for this project was to make a game or simulator on Scratch that involved the kinetic molecular theory or the atomic theory. You had to code the game/simulator with the coding site Scratch.

My plan was to make a game where you have to get from one side of the atom to the other (through a maze) but there will be electrons flying around that if you hit you are out. With a lot of help from my friends I managed to make just as I imagined.

Press HERE to see my game

It was very hard for me to start making the game because I have never used Scratch before this. I didn’t understand how it worked or what each button did.

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After a lot of tutorials and playing around making random strings of code I started to build a small understanding of what each button did. I still didn’t quite understand how it worked but I understood more then I did. I then finally started to work on my game. I had a idea in my head but I had no idea how to execute it. None of the tutorials I watched helped and none of the random buttons I threw on did what I wanted. I ended up asking my friend who is really good at coding to help me. He explained to me how Scratch coding works and helped me put code together to create what I wanted. Once I understood more how to code I started finding it very interesting. Even though it can be annoying at times or confusing its still pretty cool how you can make something do exactly what you want electronically.

Once I was getting to the end of making my game I started to understand how to make new things and I tried out some different ideas. I started to realize the different controls you could combine and how the coding works. Scratch coding finally started to make sense to me.

 

I feel like I personally took more away from this project then I usually do other projects. We did very interesting and fun experiments like these: A51856E2-AF45-4044-AD70-42C59B702CDF B5E7193F-C3C1-4F9B-9A6D-96EC216219CE 955D5EE3-3D3B-4B8B-9D54-08C980EF30BD I loved watching these and they honestly did teach me some things. Reading the textbooks and filling them out did teach me things I will remember from this project about chemistry but also the coding aspect. Next time In school I need to be able to code something or even just for fun I now feel more experienced and I know a lot more about Scratch coding.

 

I found this project really fun and educational at the same time. Thank you so much for reading this and have a great day, bye!