Category: STEM

Have you ever heard about Newton’s Laws of Motion? Well, we covered this lesson in our last round of the year. We studied each one of the laws and did experiments throughout the learning course. The lesson is not very difficult to learn itself, but it’s hard to understand without learning the key vocabulary in the lesson. Below is the list of vocabulary in all Newton’s Three Laws of Motion that you should know beforehand, in order to easily understand the content.

 

• Newton: unit of force
• Inertia: the tendency of an object to resist a change in motion
• Force: an influence tending to change the motion
• Unbalanced Force: force that causes a change in motion of an object
• Acceleration: the rate of change in direction and speed
• Momentum: the quantity of motion of a moving body
• Velocity: the change in position, direction and mass of an object
• Net Force: total force acting on an object
• Mass: the quantity of an object

 

This is just a reminder that above are only some of the vocabularies that you might encounter while learning/reading about Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Did you know that there are acid and base in your body? Well, now you know. You might not fully understand what acid and base would do to your body yet, but after reading this you’ll understand deeper.

 

When we talk pH, it’s basically just about acid and base mainly. The pH scale is between 0-14. Seven is the neutral, under seven is acidic and above seven is alkaline or base. Something that I learned in this round is that, you should never taste or smell anything you don’t know, especially when it comes to experimenting, because some chemicals might be harmful and it could cause other illnesses as well.

 

Acid and base could be defined by many ways. First of all, acid tastes sour and base tastes bitter, but never taste it without knowing what it is. Acid and base both conduct electricity, but acid produces positive charge, while base produces negative charge. There are many other properties of acid and base as well, like base is slippery. Let’s get back the first question about what acid and base do in your body. Acid is what is actually in your stomach. It helps to break down your food and when you have sickness, relating to your stomach, it might be because the acid in your stomach leaked. The role of the base in this case is just to balance out the acid in your body, because there shouldn’t be too much acid or too much base. Did you know that base is usually used for cleaning? Like soap?

 

There are a few ways to find out if something is acidic or alkaline. One of the way that we actually experiment was the red cabbage indicator, where we have different liquids and apply red cabbage indicator to the solution to find out if it’s acidic or alkaline. One other way that we learned was litmus. It is a piece of paper that will change color according to the level of pH something contains. The picture above already explains the color it might change to, regarding the level of pH.

 

This is just a little description about acid and base, but in class, we actually look at it in depth and try to understand and ask further questions to understand even better.

It’s never been better to study something new, especially when it comes to chemistry. Carbon is basically the main focus of this round, but what is carbon? What makes Carbon so special that we focus on only carbon the whole seven weeks? Well, we didn’t actually spend the whole 7 weeks, because we only study stem every other week, which means we only studied about three weeks or so. Back to the topic, Carbon is everywhere, because 0.04% of the atmosphere is made out of Carbon. Carbon is known as the “element of life”, because all living things contain carbon in them. Besides just carbon, we studied hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide. Hydrocarbon is a compound combination of hydrogen and carbon only. Carbon needs to bond with four other elements around it to be a complete hydrocarbon. There are different prefix for different hydrocarbon, such as:

 

Meth: 4 hydrogens and 1 carbon

Eth: 6 hydrogens and 2 carbon

Prop: 8 hydrogens and 3 carbon

But: 10 hydrogens and 4 carbon

Pent: 12 hydrogens and 5 carbon

Hex: 14 hydrogens and 6 carbon

Hept: 16 hydrogens and 7 carbon

Oct: 18 hydrogens and 8 carbon

Non: 20 hydrogens and 9 carbon

Dec: 22 hydrogens and 10 carbon

 

Below shows some examples of hydrocarbon. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterward we did a black snake experiment and wrote a lab report about the experiment. 

As mentioned before, we are still focusing on physical science, but this time we look a little deeper into the periodic table and chemical bonding. We basically learned about who created and rearranged the periodic table, how the periodic table is formatted and we also learned about the elements in the periodic table. We didn’t focus on every single one of the element, but we focus on the important and common ones. Furthermore, we look closer into chemical bonding, which includes covalent bonding, ionic bonding and metallic bonding, which are related to electrons in the element. We study closely on each bonding and give examples on all of them to make sure that we are fully understood. Ck12 is a website, where we learn all of our contents from.

This year, we will be focusing on Physical Science, which is a type of science. Physical Science is the study of matter and energy, which includes physics and chemistry. These few weeks, we learned about scientific investigation, how scientists investigates the field the science. Below is a picture of the process of scientific investigation. We also learned about the states of matter and atoms. To really understand more about atoms, our facilitator have us read the atom family, which is very useful to me. We also worked in groups to do research and do a short presentation to the whole class about what is inside an atom, atomic numbers etc…