Our Board Game

The Assignment for this project was each team to create a board game that included components of what we learned in Chemistry this year. We needed to include a double displacement reaction, a single displacement reaction, and we needed to be able to turn an LED light on using an Arduino breadboard.

We decided to model our board game after the games Sorry and Trouble. We added the theme of road rage for a unique twist. We created a large house in the middle of our board to be the "home base" that players need to get all of their cars to in order to win. Each player has two cars that need to go around the board one time each before they reach home. Our reactions happened when a player did something. For example, if a player landed on the slide squares of their color, they would hit a turnpike that would push a small vial of chemicals into a petri dish of other chemicals. The rest of our reactions happened when a player pushed their second car into their home base. The pushed car would pushed a balloon full of sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, onto a vial of acetic acid, or vinegar. The balloon would fill with gas, pushing a pair of alligator clips connected by a strip of aluminum foil into a petri dish of Copper chloride. The copper chloride would eventually disintegrate, breaking the connection. The break in connection would trigger a set of LEDs on two copper strips to light up. The LEDs would be the color of that player's car, showing all of their opponents that they had won.

We then had a project exhibition night on Thursday the eighth of December 2022. We arrived early, around 6:00 pm, to set up our game. At 6:30, parents, siblings, friends, and the judges arrived at the STEM building of San Marin High School. We had two different groups of people play our board game, and both were mostly successful.

Content

Chemical Equation Components:

• Reactants- The elements in the first half of the chemical equation

• Products- the result of the chemical equation

• Subscripts- The number of atoms in each element

• Coefficients- before the chemical formula, used to balance equations

Balancing Chemical Equations-

• 1 C3 H8 + 5 O2 ---> 3 CO2 + 4 H2 O

• 2 Al Br3 + 3 K2 SO4 ---> 6 K Br + 1 Al2 (SO4)3

Word equation <---> Formulas-

• Barium Nitride ---> Ba3 N2

• Indium Fluoride ---> In F3

• Calcium Chloride ---> Ca Cl2

• Lithium Oxide ---> Li2 O

Types of Reactions:

• Synthesis- Two or more reactants make one product (A + B ---> AB)

• decomposition- one reactant yields two or more products (AB ---> A + B)

• combustion- Carbon Dioxide and water are always products

• single replacement- An element replaces its like element in ionic compound or acid (AB + C ---> CB + A)

• double displacement- Two aqueous, ionic compounds exchange ions and form two new ionic compounds (AB + CB ---> AD + CB)

Predicting Reactions-

• Synthesis reactions always end in a solid

• Decomposition reactions always end in a gas

• Single Replacement reactions always have three product elements

• Double Displacement reactions always have 4 product elements

Reflection

I feel like this project was a success. I loved working with my friends, and learning to use the circuit boards on our board game. I was in charge of the circuit boards for my team, and I feel that I was successful. My AP Physics teacher even came around to tell me that our circuit boards were the most complicated and successful out of the board games he had seen. Another positive factor we had when creating our board game was being able to use the Maker space effectively. We used every minute of being in the maker space because we had limited time. We painted, sanded, drilled, cut, and wired our board with speed and accuracy.

One thing we could have done better was communicate. We had a couple instances, where we thought that another teammate was handling a job, when in reality, no one was responsible for it. We blamed each other for not telling each other what to do, but it was really everyone's fault. We could have been more productive in class at times. Sometimes, when one teammate didn't have any responsibilities for a day, they would distract other team mates. Next time, we will improve on productivity, and communication.