Jan 7th, 2020 part 2

so i was super busy and could not write part 2 of Day 2 until now but ye enjoy 🙂

SO Lulu and I were highkey stressed about teaching our module Chemistry because we had so much to prepare in the classroom the day of. So we decided to skip lunch and buy gimbap on the go (;o). While the students were out eating we started laying out the classroom with trash-bags to cover the table and floor because we were going to do some chemical experiments. We started the module with some vocabulary words and basic chemistry concept such as chemical and physical reactions, reactants and products, etc… I thought that section went pretty well with lulu going back and forth between English and Chinese and me going between English and Korean. The students seemed to be overall engaged and seemed to understand the concepts after some whiteboard-quiz questions. One thing that shocked me was that some students particularly, Grace and Hank, were asking more in depth questions. As I go around to the tables I see Lexi holding a white board with the reaction coordinate diagram up explaining why some reactions are exothermic or endothermic. Then I see her continue to explain the arrow pushing mechanism to the CO2 and vinegar reaction we did in class. After the short lecture about chemical reactions, we went on to do the classic CO2 ballon reaction. The students were super excited and as we were explaining the reaction they started to understand the earlier concepts we introduced better [products/reactants, states of matters…] The experiment was a success and the students started to draw faces on the inflated balloons.

We also did another experiment: elephant toothpaste [rip Shelia]. What is elephant toothpaste???— it is a decomposition reaction of H2O2 catalyzed with potassium iodide. The result is an explosion of foam. We first had the students work with 12% then 20% H2O2. The students were excited about the chaotic-ness of the experiment, taking videos of the foam explosion. Some students were not feeling it because of the smell. I was really stressed because the classroom was not well ventilated so I ran around opening anything I can — bathroom doors, kitchen doors, windows, etc… At the end we did the experiment with 35 percent H2O2, but it was a bit anti-climatic because it not shoot up as much as we expected. When we tested before with a water bottle it really shot up. However, during class we decided to demo it using a graduated cylinder because we thought it would shoot higher… but I guess we were wrong.

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We had one more experiment planned for the day, lava lamps, however we spent too much time doing the other two experiments so we were not able to get to it. Super tragic because we ended up buying so much oil for the experiment… like a lot… rip 😦

Overall, Day 2 was a success I would say (so much better than Arduino day which will be up soon). After class, we had some nice warm kalguksu in myeongdong and ended it off with bingsu part 2. However, this team is horrible at sleeping at a reasonable time(except me ofc), so after bingsu they grinded to who knows what time. Welp thats all for Day 2…peace 🙂

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