Week 4: I learned how to tie a balloon!

This week has been my favorite week so far. We've learned a good deal through a variety of activities. We did quite a few POGILs, a lab, and some modeling activities.
The lab this week was dealing with the concentration of copper in a solution and how it relates to absorbency. I was unfortunately absent for Wednesday and missed the fun reactions (and truthfully I'm still a little confused as to what's going on). But the group that I'm in did the correlation curve instead of the visual, which I enjoy doing because I think colorimeters are fun. This lab is kind of similar to our first lab.
Labs make this class so much better. I often sit in math class and think to myself, why am I learning this when I know I'll never use it in real life? I think that if we did no labs and just did POGILs and worksheets all year this class would take on a similar effect. Thankfully, we do other things which makes this a rather lively course.
We also started an activity where we made balloons into molecules in order to better visualize what they actually look like. This involves blowing up and twisting together red and white balloons (symbolizing electron clouds). This is a really good way of teaching us materials, as we're more excited about participating and we have to understand the concept in order to finish it. We haven't yet finished this activity, but I believe we're also going to make models out of toothpicks and gumdrops. I think the purpose of this activity is to get us to understand that Lewis models, despite their undebatable usefulness, aren't actually visually accurate. I imagine that this might have been a common misconception. I was searching the internet for "balloon molecules" and I found a very different approach to making balloon models using long balloons. This seems like a cool idea.

On the homework front, we've been doing tons of lecture quizzes, which I enjoy. I usually watch them all twice, so I can get a better idea of the whole picture instead of little chunks only. I also like that the questions make me think about the concepts rather than just doing work.
For your weekly science meme, Chemistry Cat is back!