Today we started a lab where we are the chemists out to solve a murder staged in the common board game of Clue. I was initially overwhelmingly confused, however, I was eventually able to figure out that we were mixing the poison that killed Miss Scarlet with sodium carbonate, and the result of this reaction would tell us whether the poison was potassium iodide or silver nitrate. If a precipitate forms (which mine did), then the poison is silver nitrate. However, if it doesn't form a precipitate, then the poison is potassium iodide. Of course, this is only the first step. To determine who had the murder weapon/poison, we next have to determine the molarity of the solution of the silver nitrate/potassium iodide. I haven't gotten the details of this part 100% figured out, so I'll wait until next post to tell you about that. One thing I learned this lab is to not mill around if you don't know what to do, just ask. As I said earlier, I didn't really know what I was walking into, and if I had started by asking our teacher what on earth we were doing, I might have been able to finish filtering my solution.
In regards to the lectures we've seen so far, the lessons aren't too bad; it's just hard going through them so quickly, however, once I made the time to really learn the subjects, it hasn't been that difficult. The only subject that confused me was the aliquot, but www.ausetute.com helped me out to understand it.
I'm still somewhat worried about the quiz, so I found some good websites for a little help: www.youtube.com (a crash course chemistry video that explains dilutions, molarity, and polarity), www.youtube.com (a crash course chemistry video that explains more about polarity, molarity, and mass percent), and science.widener.edu (generates an infinite number of molarity problems and even varies whether you are given information on moles, molarity, or volume).
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