Habit+of+Mind+6


 * CREATING, IMAGINING, INNOVATING... BECOMING FUTURE THINKERS**

Sure, it's easy to follow directions and conduct experiments when we've been conveniently provided the lab procedure and materials. Everything we usually need is literally under our noses. However, the real challenge is when we have to 'create, imagine, and innovate' our own experiment with respect to what we've learned in class. For my last Habits of Mind, I would like to focus on, in my opinion, the zenith of our General Chemistry education: creating our own lab from scratch. We had to apply everything that we learned: from calculating the amount of moles, calculating concentration, lab protocol, writing up data processing with uncertainties and percentage of error, and comparing and contrasting our hypothesis with results in our conclusion.

Our achievement was highlighted in our Sodium Thiosulfate experiment and another created lab, and both came back with high marks. There is another opportunity provided to our class for those who need another change, but we've got it down. Amy and I both worked really hard on our procedure for Sodium Thiosulfate, and it was challenging to work by ourselves and individually apply our opinions as we split up and did our own lab drafts. In the end, it was a success because both of us were able to apply what we had learned in our year so far in Chemistry to evaluate our experiment.

My second achievement was working with Brendan and Elizabeth in our titration experiment. We had to work together as a team to calculate the number of mL needed of Hydrochloric Acid to 'titrate' an unknown amount of moles in an NaOH solution. We added two drops of phenolphthalein into the NaOH and dropped Hydrochloric Acid into the solution until the solution turned pink. I thought creating the procedure for this experiment was quite fun and challenging, because we had to apply the equations that could solve number of moles and then concentration. Here is the video below:

media type="custom" key="13483352" HCl/NaOH Experiment

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