Hi! My name is Jens Rischbieth and I am a Senior at the American School of Tegucigalpa! I’ve been here at AST for quite a while now and consider myself to be a melting pot of nationalities, Germany, the United States and Honduras being some of them. I am also an International Baccalaureate Diploma Candidate that is taking all 6 required IB Classes alongside one extra IB class: Chemistry. I plan to study Computer Science in college but I am also interested in taking Chemistry courses in college so as to develop the passion I have always had for Chemistry, maybe even getting a second degree as part of this endeavor.
My purpose for conducting the investigation was that of determining more about voltaic cells, as the explanation I received in class did not suffice. What we learned in our IB Chemistry class only touched upon the basics and I wanted to investigate this further by conducting my own research rather than looking it up online. My investigation using the simulator was successful as it predicted the results that the Nernst equation gave us.
Electrochemical Cells simulator.
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The Nernst equation is the more formal mathematical way of understanding the effect of the concentrations and the data I obtained on my own would have allowed me to formulate a hypothesis similar if not identical to the one I would have obtained if I had started with the Nernst equation.
Even though people might believe my work did absolutely nothing in terms of contributing to the scientific community, it actually did contribute to the scientific community as I was able to prove the Nernst equation’s validity and applicability. I was able to meet my objectives and am happy I conducted my own research individually without looking up the answer to everything beforehand.