CANDY SCIENCE – Summer Camp Day 2

I seriously love our how each day has a focus and how I cannot absolutely pick which is my favorite but come on, candy, if this is not hands down some of the most engaging experiments you ever do then something must be wrong.

We start out with Gummy Bear Lab. I have some great printables to go along with this experiments. We test various liquids and leave the gummy bears for a day. We are setting this one up first and having groups test a liquid then hypothesizing and we’ll check on them tomorrow. You can check here to see up close a different time we tried it. Always a showstopper!!

Here’s some ideas of liquids to try:

Here are some of our cups with liquid and then the results:

Then we do an M&M and Skittles experiment with warm and cool water. This one is pretty basic but never fails to excite some “ooohhs” and “aaahhhss”

You can check out this post – for more up close pictures and a FREEBIE!

We then tested which candies would float or sink. This one is pretty eye opening. Just like diet soda versus regular you can get into some great discussions with students about density and buoyancy.

I used my leftover Easter candy because I had it on hand. This makes a great super easy experiment that can be done with household items.

3 Musketeers floating!!

Twix – really wants to float – my theory is that the cookie in it is lighter since it flipped over.

Next up we tested the “sourness” of different candies. This is a FAV! I used a bunch of different candies that were a $1 from Walmart. So easy to do and fun for kids to break it apart. A great trick is to use warm water to get coatings off candy and/or just crush them up. Again such an easy to way to create hypotheses and experiment. With older students we get into the acid base discussion and talk about what specifically is going on with the bubbles. Don’t forget to listen for bubbles as well as look.

Below is a picture of all the different candies we tested for “sourness.” I videotaped the results but you can also find them on Youtube candyexperiments.com

Extreme SourPatch Kidz and Mike and Ike sours were voted best in our class but all sour candy works well and pixie sticks and sweet tarts.