Plenary Sessions:
Importance of water - dirty and clean
We must save water and appreciate it and not take it for granted as there are people in the world who do not have access to clean drinking water and fall sick very easily.
Revolution of Microelectronics Technology
Electronics can be integrated to form better technology like bionano electronics.
Biomedical engineering and technology
Reducing size for a fixed volume to get a larger surface area to have more energy.
IT for Animation
Animation is a painstaking process that needs lots of labour to create frames and animate them.
Disappearing glaciers, rising sea levels, gravity being important
When a glacier melts, the land will pop up, so the sea level near the glacier will decrease while the sea level far away from the glacier will rise.
Deepest impression:
The plenary session that gives me the deepest impression is the one about glaciers, and rising sea levels. This is a problem as it concerns the environment. If the glaciers keep melting, the sea level far away will keep on rising, and tide will rise and causing some islands to be submerged. This will be a major problem for people in the future.
Day 3 Reflection:
Extraction of Caffeine from Tea
I choose this project because I have an interest in chemistry and like to do some of these type of experiments. I find that it is quite fun and interesting to do such hands on experiment. It is also interesting to find out how do you get back the caffeine from drinks like tea, as they are in our drink that people always drink, like coffee, tea of coke.
My role in my group is that I help out in the experiment, that we followed the steps correctly and also do some of the steps, like controlling the separation of the separation funnel, boiling the tea and scrapping the caffeine from the glass bottle out and some others. I also helped out in doing the presentation and presenting them.
Challenges that we faced is that our buchner filtration did not work out really well, as the color of the tea is still quite light and sometimes there are holes in the filter paper. We overcame this by filtering a few times. Then my friend spilled tea while pouring it out of the buchner filtration flask, so we had to clean up and continue with our remaining tea. It was also hard scrapping the caffeine out so we just kept on scrapping and we could not really scoop them out so we just poured them out.
I have discover that caffeine can be separated from drinks by many methods, like solvent extraction, however, the solvent we used, which is dichloromethane, which is toxic, so after that the tea or caffeine can no longer be eaten or used to make other products.
I have benefited as I learn how to be careful when handling toxic substances and doing experiments, not to spill anythings and keeping the place neat, as there is not a lot of space in the area for us to do our experiment. I also learnt how to do other steps, like buchner filtration, separating funnel as well as using the rotary evaporator.
I will be able to be more interested in chemistry from this experience and so I can understand more about it and do better in chemistry to get god results. I will be able to understand better when the teacher is teaching, when I come across something like this or using the same steps, I would be more familiar when doing them.
Done By: Brendon Goh
