This is a curriculum level 5 class. Students must come to class with tools ready to learn and record their learning. Pens/pencils and a dedicated notebook are suggested, although a device for note-taking is fine as well.
Marine science: Weeks 1-5
If you've ever wondered who lives in a pineapple under the sea, or you yourself have wanted to live beneath the waves in a yellow submarine, then this is the class for you.
Topics and skills will include:
- adaptation, speciation, taxonomy (context: how do deep sea creatures survive in such extreme conditions?)
- plate tectonics, continental drift (context: deep sea geologic features like hydrothermal vents, canyons, ridges, and rifts)
- data measuring, data processing (tabulating, averaging, identifying outliers), and graphing data (contexts: bathymetric maps, etc.)
Chemistry - it's Au-some: Weeks 6-10
Let's put on our lab coats and explore the awesome world of chemistry!
Chemistry is a world of colour, smells, taste, and sounds...With chemistry, we can make things glow in the dark, turn common metals to gold, ignite fuels to propel rockets, and many other reactions that fizz, bang, pop and delight.
The course will be structured in the following sequence of topics:
- What's the matter? (what are atoms, particle theory, what makes elements different from one another, what is the periodic table, what is it used for?)
- Heavy metal or soft rock? (looking at the chemistry of metals, and comparing the chemical and physical properties of the different types (alkali, alkaline earth, and transition metals), ionic bonding)
- Advanced basic chemistry (acid and base chemistry)
- I told a joke about Neon. There was no reaction. (how to make gases via chemical reactions, writing word and balanced symbol equations, covalent bonding)
Curiosity and a desire to understand how and why these reactions happen are important qualities to bring with you!
We'll conduct many experiments, and students must be prepared to come in every day to work safely and responsibly with chemicals in a laboratory environment. Closed-toed shoes must be worn.
There will be regular quizzes to assess what we've learned from the practicals, so keep good notes and seek to understand the how's and why's of chemistry we do.
I will also share lots of bad/amazing chemistry jokes.