Fun hands-on science activities to engage your child in discovery learning

By Science Adventures’ Andy the Science Wiz

Candy Lightening

What you will need:
One roll of wintergreen-flavored LifeSavers
A mirror
A room you can make dark

What to do:
Wait until dark or go into the dark room. Wait for a few moments until your eyes get used to the dark. Pop a Lifesaver into your mouth and chewing with your mouth open crunch it into tiny pieces while looking in the mirror. What do you see?
What you are seeing is called triboluminescence, from the Greek word tribein, which means “to rub,” and the Latin word lumin, which means “light.”

When you crush the candy you are breaking apart the sugar crystals. These crystals tend to break along areas of weakness which leaves negative charges on one side and positive charges on the other. These charges want to get back together so they leap together forming mini lightening bolts. These tiny bolts are mainly made up of invisible ultra violet light and would be very hard to see except that the candy is also covered in Wintergreen oil. Wintergreen oil is fluorescent and is made from atoms that absorb invisible ultraviolet light and turn it into visible blue light that you can see.

 

Soda Fountain

What you will need:
Open Space Outdoors
1 Bottle of Diet Coke
1 Tube of Mentos Mints
1 Piece of Stiff Paper

What to do:
Use paper and tape to make a narrow tube that will hold 3-5 mints and allow you to drop them into the top of the soda bottle quickly. With an adult find an open space that is okay if you get wet with soda. Place the bottle on a flat surface.

Place 3-5 mints in the paper tube. Take the cap off the soda and quickly place the paper tube over the neck of the bottle so the mints fall into the soda. Quickly step back!

Soda is filled with carbon dioxide gas dissolved in water under pressure. When you drink soda this gas is released slowly forming tiny bubbles that tickle your tongue. In this experiment you use the mints to release the gas all at once making a soda fountain.

The reaction that happens is not a chemical reaction but a physical reaction.  The surface of each of the mints is covered with mint oil and thousands of tiny pits that are perfect nucleation sites.  Nucleation sites are nooks and crannies that allow bubbles to form. The oil on the candy’s surface helps to break surface tension, allowing thousands of gas bubbles to form quickly in the microscopic pits.  The moment the candy plunges into the soda, bubbles form and gas comes out of the soda. The weight of the mints also helps to break surface tension as the mint drops and causes the bubbles to form all the way to the bottle of the bottle giving us our amazing fountain.