Week 7 Blog Entry

This week in AP Chemistry, we started off the week by going over some more review problems in preparation for our covalent bonding unit test. The night before, we were to complete a task chain which helped us review for our test. When I answered a question wrong—which happened quite often—there was valuable feedback which I added to my notes. On Tuesday, we took our test and I was actually quite happy with my results, although my most prominent emotion was relief.

Wednesday was perhaps the most important day of all, however—it was Mole Day! Mole Day (10/23) was a great time to relax in AP Chem and enjoy some mole cookies and hot chocolate. We had to crawl into class through the mole cave, a not-so-easy task with an unreasonably heavy backpack to carry. We listened to a mole day song, a tune that ended up getting stuck in my head for the rest of the day. We also received an essay assignment discussing the chemistry of paintballs. Truthfully, I have always wanted to go paintballing but I’m hesitant due to the pain of an exploding paintball on skin. The article discussed some familiar concepts such as polarity and hydrogen bonding, and also introduced some new ones such as solubility.

On Thursday, we took a grueling AP Chem pretest and filled in the multiple-choice answer we thought was best. I flipped through the packet of test questions and answered the ones I knew first—these usually involved VSEPR and stoichiometry. However, I would say that 90% of the test contained questions of which I had no idea how to answer. It gave me a good idea on what the AP Chem test at the end of the year will be like. Truthfully, I ended up guessing on most of the answers but I was pleasantly surprised when found out I scored around 40% (I was expecting something in the 10-20% range)! That just goes to show that my blind guessing skills can’t be all bad.

On Friday, our class began our new unit on metals and ionic bonding. We completed a POGIL on ionic bonding and started a new metals POGIL. We explored the relationship between ion size and melting point, and determined the most common ion of an element. Metals were usually cations, and nonmetals were anions. Dr. J displayed how the melting point increased along with the energy by using a sodium model with magnets. It took force to pull the atoms apart, and there was energy when the atoms snapped back together.

This weekend, we also completed a lecture quiz on metals. The lecture involved taking an excerpt from a movie that went into depth on the process of making an alloy for a bell. The video was actually very interesting to me because at one point, a sample of brass was analyzed in a machine and superimposed on a computer. The actual atoms could be seen! That was really neat for me; it makes me wonder if eventually, we’ll be able to capture the exact shape of an atom so we won’t need to rely completely on VSEPR theory.