Blog Post #8

 

     This past week in chemistry has certainly been a busy one. Some main ideas that we focused on were inter molecular forces and how they effected different characteristics in ionic compounds. The most important inter molecular forces are London Dispersion Forces (LDF), dipole-dipole, and hydrogen bonding. Although there are a couple other important ones, these are the most important. These inter  molecular forces effect multiple characteristics of ions, one of these is boiling point. The general rule for boiling point is the bigger the ion, the higher the boiling point. This is due to the fact that there are more electrons in bigger ions. When there are more electrons the ion becomes more polarizable which leads to stronger LDF's which in turn leads to a higher boiling point. Some important details about inter molecular forces are that they are much weaker than covalent bonds and hydrogen bonding is the strongest of all inter molecular forces. We did multiple POGIL's to understand all of these activities. The most helpful was probably the one with the Femto beaker and all of the magnetic models ( POGIL on IMF's).
    I feel like I understand everything we went over this week very well and therefore don't really have any questions. My participation this week was very good. I feel like I was a very productive group member as I helped and participated in each of the activities. I would definitely say I understood everything form this past week very well. I found all of the activities relatively easy and haven't encountered too many problems. One thing I could maybe work on is explaining higher boiling points better. I understand it but I should work on explaining it better. One thing that has changed my perception is that larger ions have higher melting points.  Before this I assumed smaller ions had higher melting points because they were more tightly bonded.