Weekly Blog 9/16 through 9/22

We began this week with a focus on limiting reactants and using stoichiometry to find which reactant was limiting the reaction. Limiting reactants seemed like it would be difficult before we actually learned how to do it. Stoichiometry seems to be very useful for a great amount of things with equations, in a simple way. Here is a great website for review of using stoich to limit reactants. We also did some practice particle diagrams to help us visualize the process of limiting reactants better rather than trying to look at cold numbers. 

To build off limiting reactants, we then learned how to use stoich to find the yield of reactions. Again, this seemed hard in theory but stoich made it very simple and easy to find the yield of reactions after you knew the limiting reactant. Yield is a simple concept and the only important thing about it is to find the limiting reactant in order to find theoretical yield.

This week was mostly practice with worksheets and whiteboarding, but we learned a lot. I feel like the whiteboarding is very useful because I get to see how everyone else does it and it also allows me to work with other people on problems, which helps me a great deal. There were no experiments this week, which is a bit of a disappointment as I love experiments. Oh well, there's always next week!

I'd say I have a solid understanding now of stoich and limiting reactants and finding yield. It's mostly just repurposing stoich to do different things, so once you have the base of it then you can do all the peripherals, I guess you could call them.

I don't have many pressing questions about this week except I do wonder what else can be done using stoichiometry. I'm sure we'll learn more about it next week or in the future.