Chemistry

I. Title:
Bath Bombs
II. Materials:
 colouring
 flower petals or body glitter
 sweet almond oil
 scented oil such as lavender oil
 10 tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda
 3 tablespoons of citric acid
 2 large mixing bowls
 1 large muffin tray
 1 small glass jar
 rubber gloves
 spoon
III. Procedure:
1. Grease the sides and bases of a large muffin tray with a small
amount of almond oil.
2. Place the citric acid and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Mix
the ingredients together well, to form the base mixture.
3. Scoop out about half a cup of this mixture and put it in into another
bowl. This will make about one or two bath bombs (depending on
the size of the holes in your muffin tray). You could also use old
plastic containers or anything that will hold a shape.
4. Add the flower petals or body glitter to the base mixture.
5. In the small glass jar, mix together 6 drops of your scented oil, 5
teaspoons of sweet almond oil and about 10 drops of food colouring.
6. Gradually pour the oil mixture into the half cup of the base mixture.
While wearing rubber gloves, quickly mix it all together. The
mixture is ready when it stays together in your hands without
crumbling too much.
7. Spoon the mixture into the muffin tray. Press it down firmly.
8. You can use the rest of the mixture with other types of scented oil
or food colouring to make more bath bombs.
9. Leave the bombs in the tray to set for a few days.
10. Carefully up-end your bath bombs to remove them from the moulds.
Run a bath, hop in and drop a bomb. Watch it fizz!
IV. Application:
The result is called sodium citrate. During the reaction, carbon dioxide is
released. This causes the ‘fizzing’ that you see, similar to that in carbonated
water. The sweet almond oil is released during this reaction. It will form a thin
layer on your skin which can help to moisturize it. The lavender oil is for
fragrance.
I. Title:

Bottle fountain

II. Materials:

 A soda bottle

 Water

 A funnel

 1 balloon

 Blu Tack

 A straw with a bend in it

 A tray to catch excess water

 Optional blue food colouring

 A boxcutter

III. Procedure:

1. With adult help, carefully make a small hole in the side of the plastic
bottle with the boxcutter.

2. It can be worth cutting away some of the plastic completely rather than
making an ‘X’ shape, this will allow the straw to sit easily in the hole.

3. Seal around the straw with Blu Tack or modelling clay. Make sure that the
bottle is dry here or the Blu Tack won’t stick as well. Keep the star
pointed upwards.

4. Optional: add some food colouring to your water

5. Add the funnel to your bottle and carefully pour your water into the bottle.
You’ll notice that water will rise up through the straw to the same height
as the water inside the bottle. This is due to equal air pressure pushing
downwards through the opening of the straw and the bottle.

6. Blow up a balloon and pinch the opening tightly. Carefully stretch the
opening of the balloon over the mouth of the bottle without letting go of
the neck of the balloon.
 7. Quickly release the balloon and watch the fountain stream out.The water
will continue to stream outwards as long as both the end of the straw is in
the water inside the bottle and that the balloon continues to push air into
the bottle.

IV. Application:

It’s all about air pressure! When the bottle was open, the air pressure
pushing down the neck of the bottle and the straw opening was the same.
This is why water was able to be at the same height inside the straw as
well as the bottle, even when you filled past the opening. By adding an
inflated balloon and releasing it, you created a pressure difference between
the neck of the bottle and the straw opening.

I. Title:

Cobra Weave Popsicle Sticks

II. Materials:

 Lots of Wooden tongue depressors! The size needed is 150 x 17×1.

6 mm (the shorter sticks are harder to work with)

III. Procedure:

1. Place two sticks flat on the floor parallel to one another, as seen above.

2. Place two new sticks over the sticks in step 1 to form a ‘#’ symbol,
making sure that the sticks are correctly woven together. Starting Cobra
Weave-Four Popsicle Stick forming a hashtag, and where to put the next
stick

3. Weave a new stick between the three points shown in the photo above.
Where there is a red marking, the new popsicle stick should go under.
Where there is a blue making, the popsicle stick should go over. See the
photo above for reference.

4. Weave another stick between the points marked below, again where there
is a red marking, the new popsicle stick should go under and where there
is a blue marking, the popsicle stick should go over the existing stick. See
the photo above.

5. Continue this weave on the opposite side of the chain. See the photos
below.

6. Keep repeating steps 4 and 5 until you have reached your desired length.
 7. Hint: Have some books or something heavy to place over the cobra weave
as you go along. It will help you recover from an accidental release!

8. Once the chain has reached the desired length, ‘lock it off’ by weaving a
popsicle stick, through the points shown below. Note that if the popsicle
stick is being pushed down, you want to weave the new popsicle stick
under it, and if the popsicle stick is being pushed up you want to weave
the new popsicle stick over it

9. A chain of wooden tongue depressors raising up off the ground in front of

a Fizzics science presenter. When ready, remove the final stick and watch
what happens!

IV. Application:

When the sticks are weaved together it creates potential energy due to the
tension within each stick. When one end of the sticks is released, the
potential energy is released and converted into kinetic energy. The moving
stick then slips out of the chain, releasing even more stored potential
energy from the adjacent sticks. This sequence continues until the chain
ends or is broken.

I. Title:

Rising water experiment

II. Materials:

 A bowl

 A candle

 A clear glass cup that is taller than the candle

 Water

 Playdough

 Matches

III.Procedure:

 Using the playdough, fix the candle to the bowl so that it sits upright
inside the bowl.

 Pour some water into the bowl.

  With the matches, light the candle.

 Cover the candle with the glass cup. Watch what happens! If you want,
you can add food colouring into the water to make the experiment
more visible.

IV. Application:

When the experiment is run you can see tiny bubbles escaping under the glass
which shows that the increased air pressure from the heated air as the candle
burns. Once the candle runs out of oxygen, the candle burns out and the
remaining air inside cools down. Cooling air contracts (see liquid nitrogen on
a balloon!) which lowers the air pressure inside the cup. This created a
pressure difference between the air inside the cup and air outside the cup. This
pressure difference caused the high-pressure air outside the cup to push the
water down into the plate… allowing the water to be pushed upwards into the
inside of the cup towards the lower pressure air inside.

I. Title:
Leak Proof Bag
II. Materials:
 One Zip Lock bag
 Water (enough to fill up the Zip Lock bag)
 Five Sharp pencils
III. Procedure:
1. Fill the ziplock bag with water and close it.
2. Hold up the ziplock bag and poke it with the sharp end of the
pencil. Try fast vs. slow… which works better? Push the pencil all
the way through the bag!
3. See how many pencils you can stab into the bag before it starts to
leak
IV. Application:
The bag is made from a flexible plastic polymer!
 When you stab the pencils through the bag, the plastic polymer moves
apart creating the hole. Once the pencil has moved through the hole, the
polymer pushes back up against the pencil to create a temporary seal with
friction.

I. Title:
Sink the foil boat
II. Materials:
 Aluminum foil
 A tub of water
 Marbles, metal nuts or anything else you want to use as weights
 Optional: A scale to measure the weight
 A mess bucket and cleaning materials
III. Procedure:
1. Tear off a square of foil roughly 30cm by 30cm.
2. Fold the edges of the foil to form a neat square. This also allows
the side of the foil boat to be stronger.
3. Form the boat sides. Try cube-shaped barges vs. speedboat shapes.
4. Add marbles or similar weights one by one into the boat until it
sinks! You could also measure the weight of each object you add
to the boat for additional rigour (it is a competition after all!).
IV. Application:
 Things float in water due to displacement and the resultant forces that
act back on the object. Displacement is simply an object pushing a liquid
or gas out of the way. When you place an object into water, it displaces
the water out of the way. That same water pushes back at the object.

I. Title:
Water down a string
II. Materials:
 Woollen or hessian string.
 Food colouring
 At least one clear tub (we like to use two)
 2 volunteers
 A straw, pipette or eyedropper
 A mess bucket and cleaning materials
III. Procedure:
1. Add the food colouring to the water. You can run this science
activity with pure food colouring which tends to be make the
results more visible, however you will run the risk of food colour
staining your fingers and other things!
2. If you’re using the straw, place the straw into the water and then
put your finger on the top of the straw. As long as you keep your
finger over the straw the air pressure will keep the water in. This
 experiment is much easier though if you use a pipette or an
eyedropper.
3. Stretch the string over the tub, angling the string upwards on one
side. We actually use two tubs, so you can catch excess drops of
water in the spot where you add water with the straw or
eyedropper. So… wet the string!
4. Try the experiment again. With the wet string you find that after a
couple of tries that the water will run down the string and into the
tub!
5. You can show that the coloured water is running down the string
quite easily as this colouration will end up in your tub of water.
IV. Application:
Water molecules really want to hang out with each other! Why? Water
molecules have hydrogen and oxygen within them. When the hydrogen
from one water molecule is near an oxygen atom of another molecule you
get hydrogen bonding between the two molecules. If you scale this up to a
droplet of water there are billions of water molecules, each wanting to be
attracted to each other due to hydrogen bonding. It’s due to the hydrogen
bonding between water molecules that we see that water droplets want to
stick together (we call this cohesion).

I. Title:
Pepper & surface tension
II. Materials:
 White pepper
 One white plate
 Clear water
 Detergent
 A mess bucket and cleaning materials
III. Procedure:
1. Pour water into a shallow plate
2. Sprinkle white pepper over the surface of the water.
3. Add a drop of detergent into the center of the plate and watch the
pepper spread out!
IV. Application:
All liquids have surface tension along the surface of a liquid, caused
by inter-molecular forces within the liquid pulling liquid molecules
together. Because of surface tension, liquid surfaces act like a kind of
 ‘skin’, able to support small insects and materials on their surfaces. Your
detergent molecules reduced the water surface tension in the centre of the
plate and so the higher surface tension at the edge of the plate pulled the
pepper outwards. This is an example of the Marangoni effect in action.
The Marangoni effect describes how a liquid with a high surface tension
pulls more strongly on the surrounding liquid than a liquid with a low
surface tension. If you change the surface tension of some parts of the
liquid you introduce a difference in surface tension or ‘gradient’. A
presence of a surface tension gradient will cause the liquid to flow from
areas of low surface tension to high surface tension. Put simply, the water
surface was pulled outwards!

I. Title:
Why does Mentos & Coke bubble?
II. Materials:
 1 Bottle of diet coke
 1 Nail or small hand drill
 String
 Scissors
 Needle.
III. Procedure:
1. Drill a small hole through the lid of the bottle. Pour out the first
5cm of Diet Coke for extra working room.
2. Use the needle to thread the string through four Mentos, leaving a
10cm length of sting trailing off the Mentos Bundle.
3. Thread the trailing string length through the bottle cap. Pull the
string tight, so that the Mentos bundle is up against the lid. Don’t
let go of this string yet!
 4. Carefully screw the lid onto the bottle, making sure that the
Mentos do not touch the Diet Coke.
5. Find an area that can get wet. When you’re ready, release the
string!
IV. Application:
We are often asked how this experiment works when we visit schools.
Many students have come to believe that it is a chemical reaction between
the Mentos carbonates and the Diet Coke acids that makes the fountain
work… however, it turns out that research findings have turned up a quite
different explanation; the reaction is largely physical, not chemical. Diet
Coke has a massive amount of dissolved carbon dioxide in the liquid.
When you open a Diet Coke bottle, the gas is released instantly, i.e.
bubbles form. How does this happen? The solution is actually super-
saturated with gas – the gas would escape the liquid if it wasn’t for the
high pressure within the unopened bottle. Opening the bottle allows the
gas to be released.

Bubbles can also form on tiny points on the surface of a container, known
as nucleation points, or site. When you pour a carbonated drink into a
glass, the very fine scratches on the glass cause the bubbles to be formed
on the tiny nucleation points along the scratches of the glass. A Mentos
has many, many fine scratches on the surface; a perfect place for bubbles
form. Dropping a Mentos into Diet Coke allows the dissolved gas within
the liquid to come out of the solution extremely quickly, courtesy of the
many nucleation points on the Mentos surface.

I. Title:
Liquid nitrogen + balloon
II. Materials:
 Balloon
 Metal plate
 Liquid nitrogen
 Metal tongs
 Safety glasses
 Gloves
III. Procedure:
1. Put on the safety glasses and gloves. “Liquid nitrogen on a balloon”
2. Holding the balloon with metal tongs, carefully pour the liquid
nitrogen over the surface of the balloon. Watch what happens.
3. Hold balloon up and allow the balloon to drip the liquid nitrogen off it.
4. Watch what happens as the balloon warms up!
IV. Application:
Charles’s Law says that for each 1-degree drop in temperature an ideal
gas will drop at the same rate in volume. (i.e. it’s proportional). Liquid
nitrogen is – 196 degrees Celsius and causes the air inside the balloon to
reduce in volume as it cools very quickly. As the air inside the balloon
drops in volume, it exerts less pressure on the inside of the balloon. The
air outside of the balloon has much higher pressure compared to the cold
air inside the balloon… this pressure difference allows high-pressure air
outside of the balloon to ‘squash’ the balloon. When you blow on the
‘squashed balloon’, the air inside warms up again and in doing so
increases in pressure and is able to get bigger again!

I. Title:
Make rock candy
II. Materials:
 300g Of Sugar
 Saucepan or kettle with 500mL of water
 Wooden kebab stick or chopstick
 2 Clothes pegs
 A glass
 A metal spoon
 A place to leave the experiment setup away from ants
 Optional: food colouring
III. Procedure:
1. With adult help, carefully heat the water in a saucepan. You may
want to add some food colouring as an optional extra too!
2. Stir in the sugar slowly, stirring constantly whilst the sugar
dissolves. Keep adding sugar until you cannot dissolve the sugar
 crystals anymore. At this point just add a tiny bit more water and
dissolve the leftover crystals as well.
3. Pour the saturated sugar solution carefully into a glass.
4. Use two clothes pegs to suspend the wooden kebab stick or
chopstick in the sugar solution without the stick touching the sides
of the glass. Place the glass in space where ants cannot get at it
(you might want to cover the experiment with a cloth).
5. You may want to setup several experiments to see if the crystal
formation differs with different amounts of sugar in the water. It’s
all about variable testing!
6. Observe the experiment over several days, taking note of when
crystals start to form.
7. Run the experiment until you have grown the large sugar crystals
along the stick (without the crystals touching the side of the glass).
IV. Application:
You made a super-saturated solution of sugar and water! The sugar
crystals could only stay dissolved whilst the water was hot. Cooling the
solution down made it super-saturated, which is unstable. As the water
cooled down, less of the sugar crystals could remain in the water and so
they began to settle out onto the kebab stick, which effectively acted as a
seeding crystal. The sugar was more likely to settle on the kebab stick
rather than the glass as the kebab stick has a rougher surface. This rough
surface gives plenty of microscopic nucleation points for the molecules of
sugar to settle. Over time, more and more of the sugar continued to settle
out of the solution onto the kebab stick and so your crystals continued to
grow!

I. Title:
Skittle science!
II. Materials:
 Three different coloured Skittles
 One sugar cube, or a teaspoon of sugar
 Clear water
 One flat, shallow white plate.
 A mess bucket and cleaning materials
III. Procedure:
1. Fill the shallow plate with water.
2. Arrange the Skittles in a triangle near the centre of the plate.
3. Allow the colours of the Skittles to spread through the water.
4. The colours should form a cross in the middle of the plate.
5. Once a coloured cross is formed, place the sugar directly in the middle
of the cross.
6. Watch. Observe the results and explain it!
IV. Application:
This science experiment covers a fundamental part of chemistry –
chemicals move from higher concentrations to lower concentrations. This
is called a concentration gradient and can be found in everything from
perfume vapors wafting through the room to cordial spreading out in
water.

When you first add the skittle they start to dissolve in the water, sending
the food colours outwards as this happens. The reason that the food
colours meet in the middle of the plate as a cross and not mix is because
each food colour has the same amount of sugar dissolved from each
skittle. Once you add the pure sugar into the center of the food colour
cross, the sugar cube beings to dissolve as well. This creates a situation
where the most amount of sugar is found in the center of the plate where
as the least amount of sugar is found at the edge of the plate (this area is
basically pure water). As the sugar dissolved it pushed outwards into the
rest of the solution, sending the coloured water outwards as well. As a
teacher, there are a number of opportunities to ask kids for their
predictions and answers. They could try changing the variables to see if
there is any different effect (eg, hot water vs cold water or different
coloured skittles or different sugar types). They could try using M & Ms
as well but the chocolate colour does get in way of the experiment.

I. Title:
Rusty nail experiment
II. Materials:
 6 Test tubes or plastic cups
 6 Steel nails (avoid galvanised ones)
 Coke
 Water
 Lemon juice
 Vinegar
 Cooking oil.
 Optional: Salt water, detergent.
III. Procedure:
1. Set up the 6 test tubes or cups as shown in the picture above. This
experiment is very much about variable testing!
 2. Take a photo and write down your observations of each nail at the
start of the experiment. This is also a good time to enter this into
your own classroom blog!
3. Optional: Weigh each nail with an accurate scale at the start and
the end of the experiment. Optional: Try different nails in the same
liquid… do they rust differently?
4. Over the coming days take recording of each nail’s condition.
– Which nail showed rust first?
– If you were able to weigh each nail at the end of the
experiment, was there any difference between the nails?
Why?
5. This setup is just one way of running this classic rust experiment.
You could also try the follwing experiment conditions too:
– nail completely submerged in water vs. half submerged.
– nail completely submerged in water with a layer of oil over
the top of it.
– nail in salt water vs. nail in pure salt.
6. You could also try normal steel nails vs. steel wool to investigate
the effect of surface area on rusting rates as well.
IV. Application:
Rusting is the oxidation of metal, whereby the oxygen in the
environment combines with the metal to form a new compound called a
metal oxide. In the case of iron rusting, the new compound is called iron
oxide… also known as rust!
This science experiment is all about controlling variables to explore which
material will rust an iron nail first.

I. Title:
Detect Iron In Food With Tea
II. Materials:
 Five tea bags.
 One litre of hot water.
 Different food samples, with 100g or material each.
 Coffee filters and disposable cups.
 One blender.
III. Procedure:
1. Place the tea bags in the hot water and allow the tea to brew over 10
minutes. You want it strong.
2. Blend the food samples with water.
3. Filter the puree using the coffee filters. Collect the filtrate (the liquid)
in the disposable cups.
 4. Slowly add the tea brew to the filtrate in the cups whilst stirring. You
may see a black solid form.
IV. Application:
Tea contains tannins, chemical compounds found in plants. Tannins
are used by the leather making industry to tan leather, as well as to
influence the taste of wine.

Tannins also bind to iron in a process called chelation. If there was

iron present in your food you would have found a tiny amount of a
black solid (known as a precipitate). You need iron to make red blood
cells. If you drink too much tea you may stop iron in your food being
absorbed by your body!

Drinking tea is good for you, but try to avoid drinking tea when eating
if you know you’re low in iron.

I. Title:
Dish soap slime
II. Materials:
 Detergent. Either dishwashing liquid, hand soap or shampoo.
 Food colouring/glitter (optional)
 Table salt
 A container.
 One Spoon

III. Procedure:
1. Squeeze some detergent into the container.
2. Add the food dye, or glitter.
3. Sprinkle some salt into the mixture and stir well with a spoon.
 4. Repeat step three until a ‘slime’ consistency is reached. Each
addition of salt could take a minute or so to mix in, so be patient.
5. Try different detergents & amounts of salt as variables! This slime
is very much dependent on the materials you use. Once you get the
balance right it will not be as ‘gloopy’ as some slimes, but it’s still
a slime all the same.
IV. Application:
Dish detergent, shampoo, hand soap, and anything else you might use
to wash things contain surfactants. A surfactant is usually a molecule with
a hydrophilic “head” and a hydrophobic “tail”. This means that it is able to
bridge between water soluble and oil-soluble interfaces. An anionic
surfactant is one with an anionic functional group at the “head” position.
They are the most common surfactants used in industry, typical examples
are lauryl sulfates, laureth sulfates, sulfonates and phosphate esters. If
your soapy liquid of choice has one of these chemicals in its long list of
ingredients, it should make a slime when you add just the right amount of
salt to it.

When surfactants are in solution they can sometimes arrange themselves

into these aggregate units called micelles, where all the surfactant
molecules have their “tails” pointing inwards and “heads” pointing
outwards, or vice versa. In the detergents that we used to make the slime,
the micelles formed have anionic “head” groups sticking out into the
solution, with their hydrophobic “tails” in the centre. This gives the
micelles a certain charge density on its outer surface, which can be
affected by the addition of salt. The ions from the dissolved salt, at the
right concentration, can cause bigger micelles to form and pack closer
together, resulting in a thicker mixture or gelling effect. But if salt
concentrations are pushed beyond that optimal level, the micelle structures
can breakdown and the mixture viscosity will decrease.
I. Title:
Exploding sandwich bags experiment
II. Materials:
 Resealable sandwich bags. (you can compare cheap and expensive
bags as another experiment)
 Vinegar
 Bicarbonate soda
 Tissue paper
 A cup
 Spoon and plate
 An outdoor area
 Optional: measuring cylinder.
III. Procedure:
 1. Add a spoonful of bicarbonate soda into some tissue paper and set
to one side. Repeat this several times, each time adding more and
more bicarbonate soda.
2. Fill the resealable plastic bag with 100mL of vinegar.
3. Add the tissue paper with the least amount of bicarbonate soda into
the resealable bag and seal the opening quickly to stop the
produced carbon dioxide from escaping. You’ll see that the bag
slightly inflates but doesn’t pop.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3, each time adding the tissue paper the larger
amount of bicarbonate soda until you get the bag to fill up with so
much gas that the bag seal pops!
IV. Application:
Vinegar + Bicarbonate Soda —> Carbonic Acid + Sodium Acetate

The carbonic acid is unstable though, so it breaks down into water and
carbon dioxide, causing the pressure to increase in the sandwich bag until
it pops. The tissue paper was used to slow down the experiment by
reducing the contact of the vinegar with bicarbonate soda, at least enough
so that you can seal the sandwich bag.

I. Title:
Soap in the Microwave
II. Materials:
 A microwave
 A microwave-safe bowl.
 Household soap, wet soap works best. So use an old bar of soap
from the shower.
III. Procedure:
1. Place the bar of soap in a microwave-safe dish and zap it in a
microwave on high for between 30-60 seconds.
2. You may need longer for low power microwaves.
3. Watch as a foamy mass grows from the soap! (Careful; do not
touch until the soap is cool).
IV. Application:
 The water inside the soap is undergoing a phase change from liquid to
water vapour and expanding. The foamy effect comes about from the
expansion air bubbles trapped inside the soap. By heating the soap and
expanding the water and air inside, you end up with this lovely warm
soapy foam.

I. Title:
Fill a Balloon with CO2
II. Materials:
 Empty bottle
 Spoon
 Funnel
 Bicarbonate Soda
 Vinegar
 Balloon
III. Procedure:
1. Place the funnel in the bottle and pour in 50mL of vinegar.
2. Put the funnel into the balloon and then add a spoonful of
bicarbonate soda.
3. Carefully stretch the balloon over the top of the bottle.
 4. Whilst holding the balloon onto the opening of the bottle, raise up
the balloon to allow the bicarbonate soda to fall into the vinegar in
the bottle. The balloon rises as it fills with carbon dioxide gas!
IV. Application:
Reacting vinegar and bicarbonate soda together produces carbon
dioxide and water.
The reaction is as follows:
Vinegar + Bicarbonate Soda —> Carbonic Acid + Sodium Acetate
The carbonic acid is unstable though, so it breaks down into liquid water
and carbon dioxide as a gas, causing the massive ‘build up’ of pressure
you saw in the experiment.
The water is left in the vinegar solution whilst the carbon dioxide rises and
fills the balloon on the bottle.

I. Title:
Erupt a Volcano
II. Materials:
 100 mL Vinegar
 4 tablespoons of bicarbonate soda mixed in 150mL water
 150mL Detergent
 A few drops of Orange or Red Food Colouring
 A 500mL container
 And for a more realistic looking volcano, brown coloured play
dough
III. Procedure:
1. Mix the detergent, food colouring and vinegar in the 500 mL
container.
 2. Put the mixture outside, or at least in a place where you are
allowed to get messy.
3. If you want, you can make a mode of a volcano out of the play
dough. However this is not necessary.
4. Mix the bicarbonate soda and water into a glass and stir.
5. Pour the Bicarbonate soda and water mixture into the 500mL
container; the container with your detergent, food colouring and
vinegar mixture.
6. And Stand back.
IV. Application:
Reacting vinegar and bicarbonate soda together produces carbon
dioxide and water.

The reaction is as follows

Vinegar + Bicarbonate Soda —> Carbonic Acid + Sodium Acetate

The carbonic acid is unstable though, so it breaks down into liquid water
and carbon dioxide as a gas, causing the massive ‘build up’ of pressure
you saw in the experiment.
The water is left in the vinegar solution whilst the carbon dioxide rises and
fills the balloon on the bottle.

I. Title:
Walking water
II. Materials:
 Two paper towels
 Water
 Food colouring- ideally two different colours
 Three Cups
III. Procedure:
1. Fold the two paper towels into two tubes roughly 20cm long.
2. Fill two cups with water and add food dye to each, ideally of
different colours. To get the best effect, use undiluted food
colouring or at least very strong!
 3. Place an empty cup between the two full cups. Place one end of a
paper tube into one cup filled with coloured water and the other
end into the centre empty cup. Repeat this step with the other cup
of coloured water and paper towel, so that the cups and paper
towels alternate as follows: cup, towel, cup, towel, cup.
4. Wait for several hours. If you would like to see the process more
clearly set up a time-lapse camera to watch over your experiment!
IV. Application:
Water has a strange ability called ‘capillary action’ were, due to its
stickiness (surface tension, adhesion, and cohesion), it can travel through
materials without the assistance of other forces. Because of this, the dyed
water travels through the paper towel and into the empty glass. If you had
used two different dyes you should have seen the colours mix in the
middle glass.

I. Title:
Drops on a coin
II. Materials:
 A coin
 A pipette, eyedropper or a straw
 Clear water
 A mess bucket and cleaning materials
III. Procedure:
1. Place the straw in some water and then put your finger over the
end. You can now remove the straw and keep the water inside (this
works due to air pressure holding the water up). You could use a
pipette to make this science activity easier too.
 2. If you’re using the straw, carefully remove your finger to release
your first drop of water.
3. Keep adding water drops, counting each one!
4. If you look from the side, you should start to see the water begin to
bulge over the side of the coin
5. We find a pipette easier for this part of the experiment.
6. Keep going until the water spills over the side of the coin.
IV. Application:
You are able to fit so much water on top of the coin because of surface
tension. All liquids have surface tension along the surface of a liquid,
caused by inter-molecular forces within the liquid pulling liquid molecules
together. This means that the surface of the water was able to pull inwards
and hold the water in place over the coin, stopping water spillage for much
longer than you would expect. Because of surface tension, liquid surfaces
act like a kind of ‘skin’, able to support small insects and materials on
their surface.

I. Title:
How to keep fruit from going brown
II. Materials:
 One apple
 One 175mL bottle of lemon juice
 One glass of water
 One sharp knife
 Three bowls
III. Procedure:
1. Use the knife to cut the apple into thin slices. You will need three
slices for this experiment.
2. Place one slice of apple in each bowl.
 3. Leave one bowl with just an apple in it.
4. Pour water into the second bowl until it covers the apple.
5. Pour lemon juice into the third bowl until it covers the apple.
6. Leave the bowls aside for at least 30 minutes.
7. After 30 minutes, check the three apples slices.
IV. Application:
When you cut up an apple, the cells inside it become exposed to the
air. The air, as we know, contains a lot of oxygen. When oxygen enters the
cells of the apple, it reacts with some of the chemicals in them, and this
chemical reaction ends up making a brown chemical product. This
chemical reaction is called oxidation.
The apple in the bowl by itself turns very brown, because the air has got
easy access into the cells of the apple.
The apple that’s covered with water goes brown a little less and a little
slower. Obviously, the air isn’t able to get into the apple cells because the
water is in the way. However, there’s also oxygen dissolved in the water.
The oxygen in the water gets into the apple cells, and causes them to turn
brown in the same way as the air. (This oxygen is the same gas that fish
breathe with their gills).
The lemon juice contains a chemical call ascorbic acid. You’ve
probably heard of it from its other name: Vitamin C. There is some
oxygen dissolved in the lemon juice, just like in the water. In this case
however, the oxygen can react with two different chemicals: the chemicals
inside the cells of the apple, and the Vitamin C. The oxygen actually
prefers to oxidize the Vitamin C, and so the oxygen reacts with this first.
Eventually, all the Vitamin C gets oxidized and used up, and the oxygen
starts browning the apple again. If you leave the apple for longer than half
an hour (like say, overnight) you’ll see this take place. The fact that the
Vitamin C keeps the apple fresher for longer makes it a preservative.
There are many chemicals we use to preserve food. Some are antioxidants
like Vitamin C, which stop the oxidation reactions that can spoil food.
I. Title:
Create a naked egg
II. Materials:
 One Egg
 A 500mL bottle of clear white vinegar
 One Drinking Glass
III. Procedure:
1. Put the egg into the glass.
2. Pour vinegar into the glass until it completely covers the egg.
3. Have a look closely at the surface of the eggshell. You should see
it start to be covered in tiny bubbles.
 4. Leave the glass, vinegar and egg overnight where it won’t be
touched.
5. After about 24 hours has passed, check the egg again. The shell
will have started to dissolve.
6. After a few days, carefully take the egg out of the glass and feel it.
What does it feel like?
IV. Application:
Eggshells are made of a compound called Calcium Carbonate
(CaCO3).
This is the compound that keeps the egg strong and protects it from
damage while the chick grows inside. Vinegar is an acid, more specifically
acetic acid. Acids are chemicals which taste sour and have a lot of
Hydrogen in them. Acids have a pH of less than 7.
When the vinegar comes into contact with the eggshell, a chemical
reaction occurs.
The acid splits up the CaCO3 into its two main parts: Calcium (Ca) and
Carbonate (CO3).The Calcium dissolves into the vinegar solution, much
like sugar dissolving in a cup of tea.It’s invisible in this state. The
Carbonate gets released as Carbon Dioxide gas, which is what all those
bubbles you saw were full of.

As the eggshell is broken up, dissolved and released, we get to see what’s
underneath.
We can see the egg white, still in a gooey liquid state, and the liquid yolk
too. Perhaps the coolest thing though is the egg membrane that’s now
holding the whole lot together. This membrane is always there, but we
usually break it when we crack the eggshell. It’s strong enough to hold the
egg together and even let it bounce from short heights, but will break if
put under too much stress. This membrane forms on egg inside the hen,
before the shell is made. It’s permeable (which means some chemicals can
soak through it) and all the nutrients that are in the egg pass through it.

I. Title:
What Freezes first… Hot or Cold Water?
II. Materials:
 One cup of cold water, 100mL in volume
 One cup of hot water, 100mL in volume
 One Stopwatch
 One Stirrer
 A freezer
 A pen and paper
III. Procedure:
 1. Stir both water cups the same amount of time. Place both cups of
water inside your freezer and start the timer.
2. Keep checking at 5 minute intervals to see which freezes first.
3. Record your observations.
IV. Application:
We started with two containers of water, which were identical in shape
and held identical amounts of water. The only difference between the two
was that the water in one was at a higher (uniform) temperature than the
water in the other. Of course, if the hot water had started at 99.9° C, and
the cold water at 0.01° C, then clearly under those circumstances, the
initially cooler water would have frozen first. However, under some
conditions the initially warmer water will freeze first — if that happens,
you have seen the Mpemba effect which describes the phenomenon. How
does it work you might ask? Several ideas have been put forward and no-
one really is sure as to which effect plays the biggest role:
1. As the initially warmer water cools to the freezer temperature, it may
lose significant amounts of water to evaporation. The reduced mass will
make it easier for the warmer water to cool and freeze than the colder
water.
2. A convection current may have been setup in the warmer water. As the
warmer water cooled it lost heat primarily through the surface of the liquid
faster than the colder water. This is due to a great temperature difference
between the cold freezer air and the warm water. The water from the
bottom of the cup then rose to the water surface, bringing more heat
energy to the cold freezer air. As the current is greater in the warmer water
than the cold water, a greater amount of liquid got exposed to the cold
freezer air. Think of a fan forced oven, circulating the hot air through the
oven heats the oven faster than just allowing the air to sit still… bakers
have known this over a thousand of years!
More on temperature and water rising or falling
3. The surrounding air around the cups may have more movement around
the warmer cup, therefore drawing heat energy away from the warmer cup
more effectively.
4. Warm water holds less dissolved gas than cold water. There have been
some suggestions that the presence of dissolved gases impede the
production of convection currents in the colder water.
5. The cold water may have supercooled, therefore not forming a solid as
quick as the hot water.