What is is it?
The chemistry board game is a project where a group of 3 others and I were tasked to make a board game with a specific theme that incorporated multiple types of chemical reactions.The reactions my group used were single replacement reactions,double replacement reactions,lighting of an led through dissolving a metal according to the activity series of elements,and finally a reaction producing a gas.
Our Theme and Reactions
For this project my group had a board that was fairly bland being just a purple board with a somewhat white path snaking along the board. We eventually came up with the idea to combine with another groups project making our overall themes together toy story. My groups board was ¨Sid´s room¨ and as you worked through our game your goal was to make it to the other groups board ¨Andy´s room¨ because you were a toy that did not want to get caught alive so he had to make it back to Andy´s toy chest.
What the Reactions Mean
As you move through our board game you will move by picking up cards and following the directions but as you move you may land on a star space where our single displacement reaction comes into play combining two chemicals to get a color, each color combo has a story to go with it for example ¨you came face to face with Sid´s dog, his favorite color is light purple mix chemical 1 and chemical 2 and if its light purple stay where you are.¨ If the person had not got the color he/she would have moved backwards. Near the start of the game the players come across the first green star where you will put copper chlorate in a dish with a strip of aluminum foil attached to two alligator clips on either side of the strip and once the foil dissolves the light should glow. The light represent an adult turning on a light making the player move faster towards Andy´s board. At the end of our board game there is an ermeiers flask filled with baking soda with a balloon filled with vinegar. When the player gets here they will pour the contents of the balloon inside the flask producing mainly CO2 which fills up the balloon. This represents the toys or toy taking a small air balloon up/over to Andy´s room starting the other groups game.
Reflection
This project was really fun, 1 because I love building projects and 2 because we got to incorporate chemistry. Freshman year stem we created rube Goldberg machines as our very first projects. This project brought those memories back trying to figure out how to incorporate our chemistry into our theme.This project was a little rough because in my opinion we were pretty tight on time. For the first few days my group was having trouble figuring out a them which limited our building time even more. Then we had to figure out how the players were going to go from our board to Andy´s board. My group had strengths them being that we recovered from our troubles coming up with a theme by persevering and being able to work fast. Another strength would be that we were able to divide and conquer which is one of the only reasons we were able to finish the project. If I was to do this project again I would be fine with our theme but I would just add more to our game in decorations. Overall this was a great project and I thoroughly enjoyed it.