Saturday, April 19, 2008

Our Science Fair Project

The Road Less Traveled held their first annual Science Fair and we joined them in it. This was so much fun and we hope to do it again next year. Thank you Iain for coming up with this idea, we really enjoyed it!

This picture below is when we were getting everything ready. It is our Diet Coke bottle, Geyser Tube and tube of Mentos. Big Jamey dug a hole and put the Diet Coke bottle into so it didn't fall over.

Big Jamey was filling it with the Mentos. I'm not sure who enjoyed this more, him or the boys!


Jamey Jr. pulled the string to let the Mentos into the Diet Coke.

Big Jamey rescued him and got it working.

We decided to try it again with the other bottle of Diet Coke and Mentos. Here's Jamey getting ready to pull that string again on the Geyser Tube.


It went really well this time and he got it to spray 3 ways!


I couldn't believe when Jamey decided to play in the Diet Coke spray! LOL!

I thought I would also post information on how this works.

Each Mentos chewy mint has thousands of tiny pits all over the surface. These tiny pits are called nucleation sites-perfect places for carbon dioxide bubbles in the soda to form. When the Mentos hit the soda, bubbles form all over the surface of the chewy mints and then quickly rise to the surface of the liquid. Couple this with the fact that the Mentos are heavy and sink to the bottom of the bottle and you've got a double-whammy! When all this gas is released, it literally pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle in an incredible soda blast.

Y'all should try it, so much fun!!

5 comments:

EC said...

Whoa! That looks totally cool!! I think we're going to have to try this one out!!

Homeschooling Mama said...

You really should! It is so simple but so much fun. I missed the shot of Jamey jumping over the spray. LOL!
Post pictures if you do it. :)

KMDuff said...

So much fun! We tried this a couple years ago and the boys loved it.
Have you tried making them into throw rockets like the youtube video? That is a bit trickier of course, but really fun.

Great photos! :)

Jamie {See Jamie blog} said...

I have never heard of doing this but we're going to have to try this! I think my husband will have as much fun with it as our 7 year old!

Homeschooling Mama said...

KM-I haven't tried making them into rockets but I'll have to check that out on youtube. Jamey & Conor would love it!

Jamie-If you try it you should post so I can check it out. :) My husband definitely had as much fun as my boys did.