Think Before You Drink: Water Quality In The Animas River Watershed
Throughout the process of this project and exhibition I learned a lot that I feel like I can take away and apply to real life. One of the biggest things that I got out of this was a better understanding of what hydration really is, and how sodium and potassium work together to maintain extracellular fluid balance between the cells. I also learned about isotonic, hypertonic, and hypotonic solutions. Isotonic is the same concentration both in and out of the cell. Hypertonic has more solute concentration in the cell than out. Finally hypotonic has less solute concentration in the cell than out. We also came to the conclusion that the average person doesn’t need the added electrolytes in sports drinks to function at their full potential, and for most workouts water will hydrate you the best. I learned a lot from the exhibition, talking about our project to different people gave us a lot of new information that we hadn't looked into yet such as, Some drinks such as coke have so much sugar in it that they have to add an acid to help dissolve the sugar. Later on we looked into this more and discovered that they don't add the acid to help dissolve the sugar, but they add the acid to help with flavor because there is so much sugar in coke that without it, it would taste gross.
I learned a lot during this project but one skill im going to take away from this is time management. Usually, time management isn't my strong point and I have issues trying to cram everything in during the last minutes. Throughout this project I was able to efficiently manage my time so we were able to get everything done. This also ties into another skill I improved on which is working in groups and collaborating with my group members on our project. Working with my group gave me the motivation to get work done throughout the entire project instead of procrastinating until the end.
Our class did a lab about water quality where we tested the ions in water samples, and that's where we got the idea for our project. What happens when we drink these ions? Sarah brought up that Powerade was advertised to have added ions and that got us curious about what sports drinks do to our bodies. Our project was directly related to water quality but I still feel like water quality is very important and this connects because we should know whats in the water were putting into our bodies. I think that it's great that were learning about water quality in school, and what better class is there to learn about it than chemistry? Where we can go out and test our water to know exactly what's in it. Its so important that we start learning about things like this now because we are the coming generation and its going to be up to us to figure these things out.
I learned a lot during this project but one skill im going to take away from this is time management. Usually, time management isn't my strong point and I have issues trying to cram everything in during the last minutes. Throughout this project I was able to efficiently manage my time so we were able to get everything done. This also ties into another skill I improved on which is working in groups and collaborating with my group members on our project. Working with my group gave me the motivation to get work done throughout the entire project instead of procrastinating until the end.
Our class did a lab about water quality where we tested the ions in water samples, and that's where we got the idea for our project. What happens when we drink these ions? Sarah brought up that Powerade was advertised to have added ions and that got us curious about what sports drinks do to our bodies. Our project was directly related to water quality but I still feel like water quality is very important and this connects because we should know whats in the water were putting into our bodies. I think that it's great that were learning about water quality in school, and what better class is there to learn about it than chemistry? Where we can go out and test our water to know exactly what's in it. Its so important that we start learning about things like this now because we are the coming generation and its going to be up to us to figure these things out.
Rock CandyReflection Questions: |
How can we design an experiment and measure the qualities and desirability of a finished recipe both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to determine the success of our recipe experimentation?
There are many different ways that we could design an experiment to measure the qualities and desirability of a finished recipe to determine how successful we are. Here is how I would do it. First depending on what you are making, think about all of the things that make whatever your making so good. For example things like, sweetness, texture, or anything else like that you can think of. Next you look back at your recipe and see which indigence, or different steps in the recipe you could change to improve the final result. For example if you are baking something you could change the amount of flower you use to make the batter thicker or thinner, or if your testing the size of something or dryness of something you could adjust the temperature or how long its baked for. If you make a control batch with the actual recipe its easy to look back and see what changed what in different trials as long as you only chance one thing per trial. Also, looking at the final product you might be able to see differences between different trials, and you can compare them to see which ones you like best and try and combine them if your testing different things to make the best possible final recipe.
How does cooking transform food and how can these transformations be understood as chemical processes?
Cooking can transform food in so many different ways and transforms every food differently and its interesting to see chemically why these changes are happening.. For example, in our experiment where we were making rock candy, we mixed our sugar and water together and a lot of the sugar wouldn't dissolve because the water had already absorbed as much of the sugar as it could. After boiling the mixture, all of the sugar was completely dissolved leaving the liquid crystal clear. We poured the hot liquid into our glasses and inserted out sugar covered sticks. As the liquid cools, it can't hold all of the sugar it was able to before when it was boiling, so the sugar starts to form sugar crystals off of the sugar coating the sticks because it needs somewhere to go and without the sugar on the sticks to be used as a seed for the crystal. The crystals would form wherever and stick to the container. Another great example on how cooking chemically changes food is when browning meat, the meat browns which changes the texture and this happens because now the proteins are bound to the carbohydrates. This is why chefs sometimes add flour to the outside of meat before cooking, because the added carbohydrates from the flower make the meat brown quicker.