Water Analysis: Instructions

Dear Secondary 3E,

Hi! Your Chemistry teachers have prepared two water samples, A and B, for all a special Water Analysis practical. Sample A is a nitrate sample with an unknown cation, and Sample B is a potassium sample with an unknown anion. 

Your class has already been pre-organized into six groups of 6 students. Please download the group list here.

Using what you've learnt in the previous classes on Qualitative Analysis, please come up with a suitable procedure to determine the identities of both the cation and anion in Samples A and B respectively. Specifically, you are to:

1. Upload a video to YouTube that captures your experimental observations (it must be a video of you doing the actual experiment), 
2. Describe and explain the observations by means of relevant chemical equations, 
3. Provide a flowchart of the sequences of tests performed by your group, and 
4. Conclude what the identities of both the cation and anion are.

You may use MindMeister to generate your flowchart, or any other online/offline tool you find useful. Please post and link all artefacts that each of your groups have generated on the class blog, indicating clearly your:

1) Group Number

2) Group Leader

3) Group Artefacts

4) Answers

Please do keep in mind that you only have 50 minutes for this experiment.

At the end of this activity, please comment critically on the artefacts of other groups, specifically:

1) Do you think their answers are correct?
2) Do you think they have described their experimental observations correctly using the right chemical equations?
3) Do you think their experimental techniques were good? Why?
4) Do you think their sequence of chemical tests were logical? Why?
5) Is there anything you would have done differently from them? Why?

Love,
Teacher Doreen