STEAM Academy: Observation Report

For high school, I chose to go to STEAM Academy. Since the first letter of STEAM is meant to represent “Science”, you would expect that I would have quite some knowledge on the subject. However, that is not the case. During my four years at STEAM, the science classes that I took included integrated science, biology, chemistry, microbiology, and psychology. For someone who does not know a lot about STEAM, that sounds like a typical amount of science courses and that someone who has taken this many science courses should have a pretty fair, basic understanding of the sciences. For someone who does know a lot about STEAM, they would know that I was in the inaugural class, meaning that each time I took a course, it was the first time that it had been offered by my school and that I was a true guinea pig for each of these courses. Because of my choice to go to STEAM Academy, I have little to no experience with chemistry.

As you can conclude from previous statements, I was in the first group of students at STEAM Academy to take chemistry. An important thing to note about about STEAM Academy is that it runs on a semester based schedule like typical colleges do. This meant that when my chemistry teacher put in a purchase order request for important chemistry supplies at the beginning of the semester, they were not approved and/or received before I had

In my seventh grade science course, we were given basic information about anions and cations, we learned how to use models to create chemical formulas, and we conducted several experiments. The only one of these experiments that I can remember in detail is when we were stationed at bunsen burners, given chemicals, and were told to find out what colors the chemicals burnt. The experiments we did were often more to keep us entertained and we were never truly explained all of the science behind