This week in Sustainability Energy and Technology the class formed the groups we will do our presentations in. The first step in the group formation was gathering the group leaders. The group leaders were assigned by professor Shatz. Then the names of the group leaders were written on a piece of paper, and numbers were assigned to each leader per each group member that would be in their group. Next the students in the class chose numbers at random and were placed in the corresponding group.
Once all of the students were placed in groups the groups met and began brainstorming. In Bijan’s group things began slowly, with little direction or motivation seeming to be present. The group scanned some web sites, and batted around ideas. Then things got silly and the experiments that were purposed were way outside of the scope of things that could be accomplished in our class. For example large combustion reactions were proposed. Then some experiments were suggested that did not require any measurements and thus were not suitable.
Finally the group decided to do an experiment involving endothermic and exothermic reactions. And it was decided that we would need citric acid solution, baking soda, magnesium metal, hydrochloric acid, Lego NXT, temperature probe, and styrofoam cups in order to do this experiment.
An endothermic reaction is a reaction that heat goes into, and thus heat is on the reactant side of the equation. While an exothermic reaction is a reaction that involves heat leaving the reaction, and thus heat is on the product side of the reaction.