I decided to do some worksheets so that I won't waste any time, after all this is the make it or break it week.
Overall this project was very interesting. I wasn't expecting the borax water to actually make crystals, the crystals came out bigger and thicker and the alum crystals. The water dissolved the dried alum (as expected). I wasn't expecting the crystals to grow in the water with other elements because as I've said I already had the original plan put together but the borax was just a "what if." It was a great project and if I could do this again I would use more food coloring to make them look more realistic. For the borax water, I would add more borax so that the whole egg shell can fill up with crystals. Since this was a what if project his is all a learning experience and I would want to try to use real eggs and see if the crystals will grow better in the real egg shell. Looking into the project I think that I worked pretty hard to get this finished. I re-wrote all the steps so that I could understand what to do exactly. Since there was different steps and recipes to this experiment, I decided it would be a good idea to compare them all together and make a recipe out of all the ones I thought would be good. Thanks to my other projects I was able to use the tools that I learned from them like patience and preciseness. The skills an tools I am taking away from this is that changing things up is ok. I was worried in the beginning because I felt that if I didn't get these crystals done correctly that I would get a bad grade but in reality science is all about trying something and figuring out what works and what doesn't and why. In this project I made egg crystal geodes using alum powder. The original recipe to making crystals out of alum powder was simply a two day process, that only consist of plastic eggs, Elmer's glue, alum powder, water, and food dye.
original recipe: day 1- with a paintbrush spread a thin coat of glue all around the egg, sprinkle alum powder to cover all of glue, and let dry over night day 2- mix alum powder in hot water until it dissolves and then add food dye. Allow mixture to cool down and then sink egg into the bottom and let it sit over night. On the second day after I finished the alum crystals, I had extra eggs with the dried alum coating and decided to use other ingredients to make crystals. What I did to conduct this project was simply substituting the alum water with borax water instead. The reason as to why I did that was because I was curious if it would work using mixtures that weren't part of the original recipe. With the last egg I sinked it in plain water to see if the product in which the egg gets sunk into matters. What is bismuth? Bismuth is a type of metal that is meltable and very nice! It is pentavalent post-transition which means that it is very chemically similar to arsenic and antimony. What do people do with it? In our class this semester it is very popular to make jewelry out of it. People have made earrings, rings, and necklace. How do people make jewelry with it? After the bismuth melts down on a heating plate, you have to take it off and let it sit for a little and then you slam it on the table and it cracks into pretty little weird objects. What can you find with bismuth in it? -cosmetics -medication for diarrhea -pigments |
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May 2015
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