Good morning and welcome to Chemistry!
I hope you are all doing as well as can be expected under difficult circumstances. We will be discussing COVID-19 and other topics of interest this week as we renew our video chats. We will be using iLearn’s Big Blue Button. Look for your hour’s button in the General/Welcome page of iLearn:
https://moodle.dearbornschools.org/course/view.php?id=409
Both hours 3 and 4 are listed. Make sure you join YOUR hour at the specified time.
3rd hour Monday at 2:20 p.m.
4th hour Tuesday at 1:00 p.m.
This week’s assignment is another Gizmo from Explorelearning.com. We are doing the gas laws, specifically Boyle’s and Charles’ Laws with a little Gay-Lussac thrown in for good measure.
You are required to check in for the video chat and do the Student Exploration worksheet and the Assessment Questions under the Gizmo. Finish by 10 a.m. Friday.
Many of you have been doing great work during this weird blip in your education. And, although education is important, sometimes our health or family are more important. I understand this and try to be as flexible as possible. Dr. K will be joining us in the video chat, I think, and she is very accessible to those of you who need assistance, especially with the language.
The crux of this week’s work is thinking of a balloon that you’ve blown up and tied off. Add heat to it and it expands. Cool it down and it gets smaller. The size of the balloon is the volume and is measured in a variety of units, but this week we will be using cubic meters or m3.
Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in the sample of matter. It’s how fast they are moving. We think of temperature usually in degrees Fahrenheit (it was freezing yesterday 32F), but we measure in Celsius in the chemistry lab and we will have to use Kelvin (K) for gas laws.
The pressure a gas exerts on an object is the force per unit area. A higher temperature in a closed container means more pressure. A smaller volume will mean a higher pressure. Pressure can be measured in a variety of units also, but this week we will use N/m3. Or, newtons per cubic meter. If you took physics you’ll recall that Newtons are a unit of Force.
There is a little math this week, so you may need a calculator. Also, this will be much easier on a computer than a phone (I think). The two glitches I had were in Activity C. I couldn’t change the mass to 15 kg. and the 400K temperature gave weird results. Oh, and you’ll need to use Google docs to make your graph.
I hope to see you all either Monday or Tuesday. Stay healthy and stay breezy!
T. Brown