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S’more | Stoichiometry

Have you had s’more before? What was it like? Was it good? 

If you (like me) didn’t know what the heck it is,  it is an amazing campfire snack in North America (according to Google) but as a Cambodian, I had never heard of or taste it before. Yet, last week in my Chemistry class, we did a S’more Lab to further our understanding and knowledge about limiting reactants (and get to taste it for the first time). 

We were given Graham crackers (Gc), marshmallow (M), chocolate piece (Cp) to make our own s’more. During the lab, we were required to balance out the equation and figure out limiting and excess reactants as well as calculate the experimental and theoretical yield. I have such a great time with my team doing the lab, by the way. 

  2Gc + M  + 3CP → Gc2MCp3   

This lab, not only it’s a lot of fun, but it had helped me to better understand about experimental and theoretical yield since I wasn’t sure on how to apply it into real life. Overall, I had such an incredible time do the lab and be able to learn about limiting reactants and make our own s’more. Yum! Yum!

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School Newspaper

Liger Edge is the name of my school newspaper that we just recently created this year. I’ve been meaning to join this project since the first time that our facilitator, Cara Shelton, introduced us to it. I feel like writing is the easiest way for me to communicate with people and that I love writing. I really hope that my articles could influence people to create change. So far, I’ve written four articles for this newspaper and we’re still fixing the website so we’ll be launching soon….Enjoy reading one of my article down below and don’t forget to check out our website: http://ligeredge.org/

On Your Mark, Get Set,…GO?

What is a university like? How difficult will it be? How am I supposed to know which university will fit for me? What do I need to do to prepare for it?

Many students that plan to go to university are often troubled by these kinds of questions for the last two years of their high school. They do not know how to better train themselves to be ready for the upcoming marathon—college—without getting sidetracked or without someone there to coach them along the way.

Nevertheless, the Liger Leadership Academy (LLA) has already worked out a way for their senior cohorts students to get into shape. They basically let their students simulate the college experience itself by creating and managing their own individual school schedule!

“I think it’s exciting to try and manage your own time,” Karen, the school’s college counselor said about the student schedule, “[the schedule] also shows how hard it is to motivate themselves to do work.”

Continue reading “School Newspaper”

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The Exceptional Trailblazer

My engineering seminar this year was very inspiring since my new facilitator had greatly persuaded me to be interested in the engineering field. One of the things that we had done for this round was researching about an influential engineer to understand their journey and their characteristic as an engineer. Below is my research paper about an exceptional engineer in the past…

Imagine if you were born to be a girl in the early 1900s, where meeting society expectation matter more than your own, what choice will you make? Follow society or yourself?

Historically, women were “confined to the home and expected to uphold traditional roles as a wife and mother.” They did not have the chance to discover or chase their dreams without receiving a reprimand.

Yet, by the start of the 20th century, there were 18.8% of women employed outside of the home as retail clerks, nurses, teachers, and typists—not as electrical engineers.

“I had always wanted to be an engineer, but felt that women were not supposed to be doing things like studying engineering.”

Continue reading “The Exceptional Trailblazer”

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No Pressure, No Diamond…

Have you been practicing for the SAT? How do you solve this problem? What is the best way to approach this problem?

Everyone had been talking about the SAT even before the summer break started. In math class this year, we had been arduously allocated all the class time to prep ourselves for the upcoming SAT on October 6th, 2018.

The first three or four weeks of school was not an issue for any of the students until we got to the last two weeks, which nearly the test date, where pressures began to heighten up.

Personally, the most challenging part about SAT to me is the timing. I could say that I basically know almost all of the math contents in the test but the time’s pressure often made me missed some of the questions.

In order to approach this issue, I often set a limit time for myself for each question that I’ve been solving. Furthermore, when I looked at the question and when it seems to have a lot of text or complicated equation, I would quickly skip it and move on to the easier one; this way I am able to complete all the easy one first. Another strategy that I’ve been taking was to always leave at least 4 minutes of the full test to fill up the bubbles. For example, if I did the 38 questions with calculators one and I have 55 minutes, I would limit myself to use only 50 minutes in order to leave 5 minutes in filling the bubbles sheet.

Our math facilitator, Jeff Boucher, always keep telling us that the SAT is not the correct way to measure our capability but it is the stepping stone that we need in order to experience the abundant opportunities that the university offered. This is why it is important to us as the Cambodian change agent. 

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” ― Mark Twain

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Flame Test Lab

Everything is made of atoms!

We all know that the best way to start a chemistry course is by learning about atoms structure and the element in the periodic table. Well, for my chemistry class this round we did this one cool lab called the Flame Test, in the purpose of understanding how the electron(s) of an element reacts to heat. 

We measured the result of the electron reaction through observing the color of the element when it’s in contact with flame. The reason that we see the colors is that of the energy that emitted by each electron when they excited corresponding to a wavelength of a particular light. 

One of the challenges that my team faced was that some pieces of the element dropped onto the bunsen burner tip so we had to make sure that it clean at all cost when we tested another element. Furthermore, when we tested the potassium chloride, we didn’t see the color change of the flame, so we just assume that the electrons gave out orange, which it isn’t accurate at all. Subsequently, this was a really fascinating and fun lab to do!