Week 23

This week in Chem, we tackled a whole new part of chemistry.  Particles that are smaller than the atoms themselves.  So far, we've begun to tackle the electron.  To introduce the concept at first, we did a very simple lab in which Mr. Abud rubbed a pen on his shirt, and circled it around a match balanced on a cologne bottle.  This match followed the pen with no contact! We determined that the match moved thanks to the electrostatic charge. By rubbing the pen on his shirt, he charged it and changed something about the particles that we do not yet know.  We did a small lab with two pieces of tape that were ripped from each other and put them near other objects to see if they'd attract or repel, and came to the conclusion that opposite charges attract, and same charges repel.  With the fact that there are things smaller than atoms, we needed a new way to draw particle diagrams.  We now use circles with dots in them to signify the electrons.  So, to differentiate between the negatively charged and positively charged objects, we have more electrons in the one that's negatively charged.  This follows the theory that we are going off of for particles.  The theory we use says that there's a surplus and deficiency of 1 single type of particle.  The other theory we are aware of is that there may simply be 2 types of particles, positive and negative, but we have no proof for that yet.  We also learned of a new property called conductivity.  Conductivity so far, means that the electrons can flow through.  So we played a game.  This game was called Will it Conduct?  In this game we had a small circuit consisting of three wires, two batteries and a light bulb.  We had the batteries connected to the lightbulb through the wires, but also connected some substance in the circuit to see if the lightbulb would still light up.  We concluded that all the metals would conduct, and nonmetals did not conduct.  There's still so much to learn in this unit and I look forward to discovering the more in-depth concepts.