Conductivity of Different Salt Solutions By: Jennifer Stall Amanda Leonard Jason Toon Marina Korolis Kris Mason Dan Pellegrini

Our Goals for this Experiment Explore the property of conductivity of solutions Formulating hypotheses, predicting relationships and gathering data Use mathematics to interpret graphical data Discover the role mathematics plays in the scientific process

Procedure First, we prepared 1M solutions of potassium chloride and magnesium nitrate. We made a prediction about the conductivity of each solution We started with a beaker -full of water, and measured the conductivity with each progressive drop Finally, we analyzed our data

How to combine Math and Chemistry Since we made graphs of conductivity vs. volume, and we found the relationship to be linear, students can easily find the slope, x- and y- intercepts, and equation of the best-fit line We can describe a mathematical relationship between the conductivity and the number of ions in solution

What we would do differently next time We discovered afterwards that using two different anions introduced another variable which invalidated our hypothesis We should use solutions that contain the same anion but different cations (i.e. sodium chloride, calcium chloride, aluminum chloride) For more information, refer to this lesson