Hydrate Lab

Yesterday I was able to do my first real lab in chemistry because my partner and I passed the pre-lab quiz. For this lab, we removed the water from the the hydrate Copper Sulfate x nH20. To do this, we first determined the mass of the test tube we would be using. Then we added a thumb-width amount of the hydrate to the test tube and took the mass again with the same scale. Then we heated it with a Bunsen burner 2 times, taking the mass once again after each heating. The hydrate was supposed to go from it's blue color to a white ash color. However, we discovered that we didn't hear it gently enough at first, so we ended up burning the hydrate and it turned brown on the outside while remaining rather blue within. Although we did mess up our results by burning the hydrate, we ended up with about a 28% error for n, as it was supposed to be 5 and we got about 3.8, which isn't too shabby for cooking our crystals way past well done. Below are some pictures of the lab as well as our data.