We were assigned to design a chemical dominoes integrating different types of chemical reactions(physical change, chemical change, single replacement, double replacement, and production of a gas). We were also required to light an LED, have a sturdy boardgame, playing pieces, blueprint, safety precaution, and setup/instruction. My group's board game theam was Alchemania. Our game was similar to the game Candy Land where you start at "start" and whoever gets to the "end" first wins. Throughout the players' journey through the game, few spots on the board has "chemical reaction" labels where the players get to do many different chemical reactions! Everyone gets a chance to do a chemical reaction, but only the winner gets to start the Rube Goldberg Machine that will trigger the most fascinating chemical reaction out of all the others!
Below are playing instructions, safety precautions, explanation of five different chemical reactions!
Reflection
In the beginning, my group and I had a very hard time coming up with ideas and integrating the chemical reactions into our board game. We spent more time on the asthetics than the concepts. However, after asking questions to our teacher and researching about different reactions, we were able to come up with five different chemical reactions. One of the hardest chemical reaction for us to work with was lighting an LED by destroying the metal. After struggling for a month, a day before the presentation, we figured out how to light an LED! It worked out well and the players were able to see LED lighting up! We learned a lot about bredboard thorugh this process. Another problem we faced was getting the exact amount for the baloon to blow up for the chemical reaction #4. One time, we put too much sodium bicarbonate that the baloon almost exploded. However, we found the exact amount through trial and error. Other than these problems, my group did well in time management and asthetics. The judges, parents, and kids really emjoyed playing our game and they thought it was well organized. Overall, I absolutely learned many chemistry concepts (double replacement, single replacement, decomposition, ect). This project was very difficult in the beginning but at the same time, it was fun working on each chemical reactions and creating our own board game!:)