Each group was tasked with designing a device that transfers energy. However, we were given the freedom to design and test our device however we wish. It was fun to have this freedom. My team decided we wanted to find a way to cook pancakes. We went through several iterations and concepts on how to achieve this. We first tried a lemon battery which we hoped to use to create a spark which would light a fire to cook the pancakes. However, we could not produce more than 4 volts which was insufficient. Then we tried to use a salt solution to create a spark similar to the lemon battery however this only produced .4 volts. Finally, we decided to use an entirely different tactic. We tested a chemical fire reaction. This would start a small fire we would then use a stick to transfer to a stack of wood. After the fire caught, we could cook the pancake. We mixed potassium permanent and glycerin which worked on our first attempt. We perfected the qualities of the reactants and then we were ready to cook.
Thermochemistry: a branch of chemistry focusing on heat and how it is stored in the form of chemical energy. This is what we have been studying with this project. Energy: the ability/potential for a system to do work such as motion. Our device had to transfer energy. Chemical Energy:energy that is stored in the bonds between atoms and is released when these bonds break. Our chemical reaction released chemical energy. Heat Energy: energy that is transferred to another object which causes its atoms to vibrate faster and possibly cause it to change matter state. The fire produces heat energy which radiated to the pan to cook the pancake. Entropy: heat can be converted to mechanical work. A system wants to become more disordered or random. The heat energy from the fire had more entropy than the chemicals. Enthalpy: a system's internal energy. The amount of energy required to make a system. Our reactions had an enthapy of reaction. Our chemical reaction had the most enthalpy. Endothermic: a reaction that takes energy from it surroundings. We did not use any endothermic reactions. Exothermic: a reaction that exerts energy into its surroundings. Our chemical reaction is an exothermic reaction. Specific Heat Capacity: the amount of energy it takes to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius. Hess's Law: overall enthaply is equal to the sum of smaller enthapys in a system. We can use this to calculate our systems total enthalpy by adding up the enthapy of each of our sections.
This was one of my favorite projects I have ever done in STEM. I had a fantastic group. We managed to balance fun with productivity. By the end of the project we needed up with running jokes, a naming scheme for our project documents, and we had eaten pancakes. We devoted time during our weekends and a school break to finish this project since we were determined to make it tactical rather than theoretical. Everyone constructed to this projected and it helped us build upon the Collaborator portion of the graduate profile. Besides my teammates, another peak would be our project working. Occasionally a STEM project must remain theoretical or it does not work. This project worked exactly like we planned once we determined which method to use. Once we finished our project, we used critical thinking to analyse the data. Another peak of this project was presenting it to visiting high schoolers from Japan. Not only did this increase our cultural competency but it also required us to understand our project deeper since we had to explain it to others. Many of these students had little English skills so we had to find new ways to communicate what we learned.
A pit of this project would be our final slideshow. We did not have precise data so we were unable to create a data table. We have since repeated our experiment and retrieved data. Another pit is no being able to eat our pancakes. The pancakes we cooked over our fire had chunks of ash in them and we were concerned about contamination with toxic chemicals. In the future, I would seek to find a safe way to use a chemical reaction to cook the pancakes to ensure the pancakes are safe to consume. Additionally, in the future, we should wait until the fire is only small pieces before we start to cook which will limit the amount of ash in the pancake. Our final pit is our time management. Although we could only run our project outside of school hours, we still should have used our time in class more effectively by calculating enthalpy or researching better reactions that are safer to cook with. This would improve our ability in the conscientious learner category of the graduate profile.