Reflective Blog 10/6/2013

    It's been a good week. It all went smooth in all of my classes the past week. We went over the hypervalency theory, where if the central atom is greater or in the third period of the periodic table. The central atom is allowed to have more than eight electrons in its shell due to the empty d-orbital. On the moodle, we also learned about bond order and strength. It's interesting to know the reason why two of the same charged atoms can join together. The reason is that the force of attraction is greater than the repulsive force due to the attraction between the nucleus to the valence electrons overcoming the force of repulsion. We also learned that as bond length increases, the bond strength goes up and vise versa. On the other hand, as bond length increases, the strength decreases. According to Couloumb's law, as distance between two atoms increases, the attraction decreases due to the further distance between the electrons of the two atoms. Coloumb's law explains the relationship between bond order, distance, and strength. By knowing the law, it helps memorizing the relationship and make everything more self-explanatory.
    We also did our second lab of the year as well. This time, we used the colorimeter to measure the mass percent of copper presented in a brass screw. At the beginning of the lab, I really had no idea what I was doing because the procedure was very wordy and confusing. Dr. Finnan on the day before the lab told us to draw a pictograph of the procedure, which is pictures of each steps of the procedure. I didn't know what a pictograph was so I simply summarized the entire procedure using almost the entire page of the lab notebook. The procedure was very complicated and made no sense to me until I saw the my lab partner's pictograph. It was my own fault not following the instruction, but at least now I know what a pictograph is and I won't make the same mistake again in the future. Through out the lab, everything went pretty smooth but the data results were wrong for my group, I guess it all comes down to knowing the procedure well enough before performing a lab. I learned that from now on, I really need to know what I am doing before a lab. I can't just show up to a lab without knowing what I am doing.
    The other exciting thing that I learned was knowing how to use a pipette filler. It's pretty similar to using a micropipette. I learned how to use a micropipette from the health and medicine magnet. I enjoy using laboratory equipment. They are really fun to play with and more importantly needs to be accurate and precise. I personally think that I am pretty good at collecting data dealing with laboratory equipment. Lastly thing that I enjoyed through out the week was that our football team had finally won the city of Ann Arbor for the first time in the history. We beat both Pioneer and Huron which was pretty exciting in my own opinion.