Group 4 Project Evaluation Day

During these 3 days of group 4 project, I was really pulled back into the environment and enjoyment of doing experiment in the lab wearing lab coats. Since the moment I chose physics for science, I have never been into the lab. It was exciting for me to put on the lab coat and gloves again with fancy lab equipments in hands. So, for me, doing experiment is itself an interesting task and I enjoyed it a lot. Especially when I was grinding the crab meats, the crispy sound would never make me feel boring. I also surprisingly enjoyed the process of shelling the crabs, although it looked disgusting. Before this project, I was the kind of person who would like to give up the delicious crab meats just because of the difficulty of shelling crab shells. But during the project, I even shelled all the main body parts of the little crabs, hundreds of them, on my own! This was a huge personal improvement for me and I overcame with my laziness. Furthermore, I also overcame my disgust of the gross smell of our experiment produced by the crab and tomato mixture. Actually, no one from our group escaped from responsibilities because of the gross experiment. Instead, we were all friendly and helpful, and always wanted to give a hand. I was really impressed when Ella put her own hands into the giant beaker to mix up the smelly, slimy mixture evenly and when Peter heating the mixture while stirring it without a mask. They just took these responsibilities spontaneously. Such teamwork spirit really impressed me and I appreciated all my teammates’ efforts.

poster design (without QR code)

Personally speaking, the most significant contributions I gave were probably the research topic (the myth) and the poster design. These two parts of the project were also the reasons why I was motivated throughout the entire project as well. I was inspired yo research about this particular myth by one of my chemistry teacher in grade 9. I still remember that on the first day of his class, which was also my first chemistry class, he told us some interesting applications of chemistry in real life. One example was that he said only if you eat a truckload of seafood will you be poisoned (according to all these kinds of myths). Now I got a chance to testify his saying in group 4 project and this memory motivated me to find out the result. And, as a visual art student, needless to say, I am relaxed and engaged when making posters. I also enjoyed to discuss and design our group video with Ophelia. I think, for us, making fancy visual expressions were more important and exciting than anything else. (Although I think it’s really a pity that some video clips we recorded and some ideas were not applied in the final video reflection. I also feel sorry that some space in the poster is not well-used and the application of 4 sciences are not comprehensively explained due to lack of space. )

Without these motivations, I may possibly be lazy and loaf everywhere. I am also thankful that I had such great teammates and I appreciated the time we spent together. I could always get along well with Ophelia and Ella. When we were dealing with the crabs and grinding them, we worked as a chain efficiently. Although the work seemed boring and exhausting, we joked around and discovered fun from it. It was my teammates who made the tasks enjoyable and the entire project lovely. I didn’t have much personal contacts with Peter before, but this time I saw a lovely and responsible Peter who would do all the preparation and research silently and was willing to help us at any time. I think what’s great about our group’s collaboration is that everyone was willing to engage and give a hand to help, and everyone was doing their strengths. For example, the visual art students (Ophelia and I) were in charge of all the designs of videos and posters, and then Ella and Peter helped for the texts. When we were dealing with the crabs, Peter helped setting up the apparatuses and do research online preparing other needed solutions, which were tasks that he could definitely manage better than dealing with crabs, and we could of course do better on handworks. In this way, everyone felt comfortable and were efficient doing their own parts.

During these days, I also found the usefulness of reflections. These reflections kept reminding me our project’s process and force me to always think back and plan ahead. So that I could make improvements and adjust any procedures in time and quickly. As a person with poor memory, reflections are the best sources for me to review our procedures and go through our entire project. More specifically, reflections let us really think about what our experiment would be at the end of the first action day. If the test trial didn’t go well, we could only make our experiment qualitative (as shown in our action day 1 reflection). This reflection helped us to plan ahead for our action day 2 and keep our experiment in track and in time.

Group 4 Project Action Day 2 Reflection

In general, our group successfully reached our target for today. Today we finished our experiment and started to do writing tasks, edit videos and design posters. Our experiment finally had a result that the arsenic reagent paper turned to the lightest level of yellow, which means that there surely is a really small amount of arsenic in the mixture of crab meat and tomato. So that we can eventually draw a conclusion about our myth based on this sign.

Poster Design

I basically finished the art design of our group poster today. Making poster was really interesting for me. As a visual art student, just as I predicted yesterday, I was motivated to design the poster just because I really wanted our poster to be good-looking and fancy. The only thing annoying was that the rendering process of photoshop was really slow on my computer and it took ages for it to add filters on my background. Besides, I didn’t have a mouse paired up with my pc so it was annoying as well when I edited pictures in detail. Now the tasks left to do for me is to fill in all the writings when my teammates finished them and do the final adjustments of the poster design once all materials are filled in (also remember to leave a space of the QR code).

Physics Introduction Video

As the “physics specialists” of our group, Ella and I also recorded a short video as the beginning of our introduction about physics applied in our project. Then we still need to record audio introductions to be edited with some pictures in our video.

Our group was surprisingly cohesive and friendly. We didn’t have any interpersonal conflicts at all. Although our experiment process was quite disgusting, we were all really responsible and were willing to do the “disgusting works” and cleaning jobs for our group. I am glad to be in the same group with them. I think the only problem of me in this project was that I couldn’t bear the disgusting smell of the final mixture. So that I couldn’t do the filtering job. So I spontaneously did the cleaning for our group.

Group 4 Project Action Day 1 Reflection

Today was the first action day of our Group 4 project. Basically we just started our project from 0 and aimed to testify the most appropriate ways to implement our ideas. A problem of our project was that we could not make sure whether our experiment should be qualitative or quantitative. It was because the amount of substance arsenic we could probably get from crab meats is too little to be tested (probably lower than 0.01mg). If we want to make our experiment a quantitative research, we need at least 5 trials, which means that the amount of crab meats for each trial is even smaller so that it’s even more impossible for us to see any sign of arsenic. Therefore we need to testify whether we can find arsenic quantitatively in part of our total crab meat. If not, we should make our research qualitative.

Me and Ophelia Dealing with Cooked Crabs

When we started our experiment in the first place, we found out that the crabs that the school ordered for us were really tiny, little crabs. So we might have hundreds of little crabs in that 4500g crabs. In order to get crab meats, we need to get rid of all these solid shells and remain these main body parts for experimental use. So we immediately started to deal with the crabs on the morning. Ophelia was in charge getting rid of all the solid crab legs and give me the main body part, then I was in charge to open the shells of the crabs and take out the crab meats, and Ella was in charge grinding the crab meats into paste. In such an effective working chain, even out of my expectation, we finished the heavy workload even before the lunch break. After finishing my part of work, I also helped Ella grind the meats. To be honest, I actually enjoyed the process really much. It’s fun to do such simple works and experience the feeling grinding the crisp crab meats. I guess being exciting doing such work was also part of the reason why we were so efficient on the morning.

Grinding the Tomato

In the afternoon we grind the tomatoes into paste so that we can mix it with the crab meat paste and put them into the imitated stomach conditions. We only mixed a small amount of crab meat paste with the tomato paste for experiment today just to test whether we should make our research quantitative or qualitative. After that we filtered the mixture and tried to see if arsenic can be tested quantitatively. But eventually we find it impossible. So we decided tomorrow we will just directly mix all the crab meat paste and tomato paste together and do it only for one trail to make the research qualitative. It means that we won’t be looking at the quantitative amount of arsenic in the mixture and find the percentage of arsenic, but to find whether there will be enough arsenic in the total mixture to kill people.

In addition, I and Ophelia also planned most parts of our video and we have recorded many materials already. I also started to plan our poster while waiting for the mixture to be filtered completely. I feel that the most motivated part of our experiment is to deal with the crabs and tomato. It was just fun to play with these materials and let my brain relax. However, the most motivated part has been done today. And the works went boring especially when filtering the mixtures since mostly what we could do was to wait. But I am still looking forward to making posters tomorrow. I am really excited to make a fancy poster for our group. So tomorrow my aim is to help my group setting up our experiment and design our group poster.

 

Planning Day Reflection

Today is the planning fay of the group 4 project. Our team consists of 4 members: Peter, Ella, Ophelia and I. Interestingly, we have no expert from the CS class, but three members learning physics. Ophelia was still in Europe today, so only we three discussed the possible topics we might choose. We thought about all kinds of topics even including blood testing and the myth that foods will still be clean enough to eat if it is picked up after dropped on the floor in 3 seconds. Brainstorming was difficult. We needed to come up with an idea that can include all 4 subjects and we should be able to apply scientific experiments based on its phenomena. After a really tough period of time filtering ideas, we finally decided to research on some most common myths in daily life —— food poisoning.

All the way back to ancient China, there have been myths about food poisoning that certain foods shouldn’t be eaten together or people will die because of food poisoning. For example, it is said that eating tofu and shallot will cause stomach stones, and eating shrimp with VC will result in poisoned death…… Among these myths, we were specifically interested in the myth that eating crab with tomato will form arsenic trioxide and finally kill people. It is one of the most accepted food poisoning myth in daily life and we wanted to test whether it is true. So our final research question is: Can crab and tomatoes eaten together produce a lethal amount of arsenic trioxide?

Brainstorm and Final Research Question

After settled down the research question, we started to deeply think about our lab designs and what we can get from our experiment. Since the myth states that the poisonous substance is the arsenic trioxide formed by crab meat and tomato in human stomach, we certainly wanted to mimic that condition and find out whether it would actually produce a lethal amount of arsenic trioxide.

What we know now is that crab consists of As(5+) and the myth claims that the tomato acts like a reducing agent of it and they will form arsenic trioxide, which is called 砒霜 in Chinese, a highly toxic substance. But the problem is, the amount of As(5+) we can find in crab meat may be less than 0.1 mg per kilograms. It means we may not be able to extract the arsenic trioxide from the crab meat. Moreover, if we want to use H2S to react with the final mixture of crab meat and tomato after put in the modeled stomach, the yellow sediment formed by H2S and arsenic trioxide may not be visible and distinguishable for us. But we still have the hope that we may find test paper of arsenic chemicals according to what Ms. Elicia told us. Seems like some students used such materials last year.

I am really thankful that I can have my group mates with me as well. Peter was being really responsible on Chemistry knowledge during today’s discussion. And Ella even got an idea of our video’s content. And I found myself, surprisingly, still remember the skills of drawing flowchart very well.

Flowchart

I know that there are a lot of people believing in the myth we are going to test, so I believe our project’s conclusion will be helpful for people around us and all people in the society. Moreover, if the combination of tomato and crab meat is really harmful to human body in certain scale, our project can also warn people to care about their own health when eating.