Showing posts with label chemistry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chemistry. Show all posts

Monday, January 22, 2024

Alchemy: A High School Chemistry/Geometry/World History Combo Study

We use CK-12's Chemistry for High School textbook as the teenager's spine for Honors Chemistry, with, of course, our own lab component added and a LOT of supplementation. 

We started supplementing right in Chapter 1, when we added a short study of alchemy to the textbook's brief history of chemistry.

I think that most teenagers find the concept of alchemy interesting--it's mystical and a little spooky, and it's very, very incorrect. Teenagers have SO much fun learning about adults who were incorrect!

Unfortunately, there really aren't a ton of great resources about alchemy that work well for a high school/undergrad readership, and there are a TON of contemporary, fantastical, and otherwise ahistorical resources that muddy up any kind of student-led research. 

Therefore, this study of alchemy was necessarily a short one, able to be completed within 1-2 hours. You could draw out the art component further, of course, by requiring a more polished piece that used a larger vocabulary of alchemical symbols and moves, but this brief afternoon's work was enough for our own purposes.

After reading the relevant material in the CK-12 Chemistry for High School textbook, my teenager and I watched this Crash Course History of Science episode (if your student isn't studying History of Science as a discrete topic, I highly recommend reviewing the playlist and adding applicable videos to their science/history syllabi as interdisciplinary enrichment):

Crash Course videos tend to be meaty, so it might be worth going over it a couple of times to make sure you absorb all the info.

After the video, my teenager and I looked through a number of alchemical illustrations and excerpts from alchemy books from alchemy's heyday. This Getty Research Institute's virtual exhibit is a treasure! Click on the link in the caption of most of the images to be taken to the digitized version of that book, which you can then flip through to find other interesting images and text. 

The teenager practiced her close reading to notice all the details in each piece of artwork, and used semiotic analysis to attempt to interpret the pieces. But also take time to notice how lovely each piece, is, as well; alchemy artwork is ART!

Using these pieces and some reference books, we then spent some time playing around with creating our own artwork that had (or looked like it had, lol!), alchemical meaning. The nature of the pieces also meant that the teenager could use the works she created as process pieces in her geometry art portfolio: 



Check out the accurate geometric shapes and the overall balance of the piece! DON'T check out my noisy digitization of the work; I really need to learn how to clean up art when I scan it, sigh...

That was as far as we took this particular lesson, but here's some further reading appropriate for an interested high school student:
My favorite thing about alchemy is how it sits just next to being correct; like, they were wrong about the Sun and the Moon and dragon's blood and the mystical marriage of lead and tin, but while they were drawing their allegorical wedding feasts and busily melting silver in little pots, they were butting up against the actual chemistry that alchemy would evolve into. What they did reads now as adorably naive just because we know better, but these people were actually pretty bad-ass wizard scientists.

They also for sure all had lead poisoning, which explains a LOT of their artwork.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, home improvement projects, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Homeschool Science: Model Chemosynthesis with Zometools



Earlier this summer, the kids and I worked through a brief Yellowstone National Park study that had us spiraling back to a favorite activity: modeling chemical processes with Zometools!

As part of that Yellowstone study, the kids and I looked at thermophiles, those heat-loving bacteria and archaea that make their happy homes in the different high heat zones of the park's hots springs. Some thermophiles, including these thermophilic archaea at Yellowstone, have a metabolism that uses chemosynthesis. It's cool and unusual, makes an interesting contrast to photosynthesis, and--just like photosynthesis!--you can model it with Zometools!

For our chemosynthesis model, we decided that our organism would be oxidizing hydrogen sulfide. There are other organisms that start with not hydrogen sulfide, but chemicals like methane or sulfide, and it would be another interesting project to model and compare various chemosynthesis pathways.

Syd used this chemosynthesis formula on the NOAA website as her reference, although when Will, who was reviewing the photosynthesis formula at the time, tried to use that same NOAA site as her reference, she discovered that the photosynthesis formula written there is incorrect! GASP!

You will be unsurprised to learn that I contacted their webmaster to inform them of the error.

One of the interesting challenges in modeling a chemical formula is figuring out the correct way to assemble each molecule:

This is frustrating for students who would rather assemble, say, hydrogen sulfide "their" way, ahem...
 Looking each chemical compound up, though, will generally also help you figure out its common name. H2S, for instance, is known as hydrogen sulfide. You probably already know that CO2 is carbon dioxide, but maybe you didn't know that O2 is called dioxygen:


So this chemosynthesis formula begins with hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and dioxygen. The fuel for the change is the oxidation of the hydrogen sulfide. This source of energy allows all of the compounds to convert--


--into sulfur, water, and formaldehyde!


Good thing THIS isn't what plants do--you wouldn't want to try to breathe formaldehyde!

I think it's important, when kids study processes like photosynthesis, to make sure they understand right from the start that there are other ways for organisms to synthesize energy. You don't want a rigid scientific thinker, who can't imagine any other way for an organism to flourish. You want a creative thinker who can look at the surface and atmosphere of an alien planet and immediately start thinking of all the ways that an organism could use those formidable chemicals and that unusual energy to live!

P.S. Want to follow along with all the other ways that I insert the search for alien life into our homeschool? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page for photos, resources, and other bits of the weird stuff we do all day.