A Foothills school is participating in an international collaborative project for the 150th anniversary of the release of Dmitry Mendeleev's Periodic Table.

Students from Strathcona Tweedsmuir School will join classes around the world to participate in the Periodic Table Project from the University of Waterloo. The project commemorateS the International Year of the Periodic Table, which coincides with the 150th anniversary.

Each class is assigned an element to visualize and design in the form of a tile. These tiles will be compiled into a complete Periodic Table.

Students from 29 countries will be contributing to the project.

Five students from Strathcona Tweedsmuir came up with designs for their assigned element: Rhenium.

Sara Nagtegaal, tenth grade student at Strathcona Tweedsmuir, says the students working on the project chose a particular colour scheme for the project.

"This was a black and white project mostly. We worked with different inks staring with black and white, and then each student added their own different elements in there."

Five students came up with designs, focusing on the various uses of Rhenium, including in camera lenses, jet engines, and fountain pens.

Michael Walmsley, another grade ten student at STS says there's a lot of thought that goes into visualizing an element.

"It's really abstract, you've got to take into account who discovered it, what's the history of the element, what's most iconic about it. For me, I focused on one of the uses of Rhenium which was its use in filaments for flash photography."

He says the project is just one example of how the school integrates different subjects together.

"The great thing about Strathcona Tweedsmuir School is that everything is combined together, so we learn a bit of Chemistry in Art, we learn a bit of English in Social Studies, and everything works together and comes together in one piece, it's really cool."

Michael Walmsley, Brandon Parry, Jake Baverstock, Sara Nagtegaal, and Bowie Wong each contributed a Rhenium design for the project.

The University of Waterloo has been slowly unveiling their chosen designs, which can be viewed here.

 

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