Assignment task: Respond to the essay below.
In this module, the topic that I found the most difficult was the periodic trends. I spent a while struggling with the practice and I still got the lowest grade on the assignment out of any of the other topics in the module. It had been a long time since I'd done any learning about the periodic table, and I struggled because I could hardly remember anything about it. To better ready myself for upcoming quizzes and tests on this module, I looked at some different means of improving my understanding of periodic trends.
To further my understanding, I started by going back over the practice information, paying careful attention to everything. Then, I explored the practice simulations. They seemed much more helpful than before, when I had felt completely overwhelmed by them. What I found helped me the most were YouTube videos. I watched a couple of videos about periodic trends and afterwards I felt like I had a much better understanding of the topic.
I now understand a lot of periodic trends. Atomic radius, the overall size of an atom, increases moving downwards and to the left. This is because going down adds electron shells, and going left means less protons to be attracting electrons closer to the nucleus. Ionization energy, the energy required to remove an electron from an atom, increases going up and to the right. This follows the trend of how reactive these elements are. These are just some examples, there are many more trends in the periodic table, but I won't list everything.