Recently, Jack and I had some science fun with seasonal candy to help get us in the autumnal mood. Those tasty and oh so sweet creme pumpkin candies are a feature of a blog post by Tina O’Block. On her site Lessons4littleones.com she has many more experiments and STEAM activities for the fall.
We chose to do the Pumpkin Tower Building challenge and the Dissolving Pumpkins experiment.
With the pumpkin towers, we needed only the pumpkin candies and toothpicks. Jack chose the colored toothpicks, because, why not? The challenge is to build a freestanding tower with only the candies and the toothpicks. Round one was fun and we were able to build reasonable towers. Round two, we changed our designs to see if we could build higher. I went with a triangle base while Jack switched to a square base. We discovered at this point, that you can use the toothpicks again, but not the pumpkins. They just cracked and fell apart. Jack became super frustrated as well and about three minutes into round two we stopped. I then switched out Jack’s creme pumpkins for jelly-type pumpkins and I stayed with the creme-style. It was much easier for Jack to build with the jelly pumpkins and he made a wonderful tower. It would have been more elaborate, but I only purchased a few of the jelly pumpkins.
While we were having fun building our towers, Jack learned some important lessons. The first is that design matters. We found that the triangular shaped base worked better for this challenge than a square base. The second thing Jack learned is that even with the correct design, you also need the correct materials. While I was able to get some height with the creme pumpkins, the tower built from the jelly pumpkins was easier to build and ultimately more stable.
The next activity we chose was the dissolving pumpkins experiment. In this experiment we placed the candy pumpkins in various liquids to see which ones dissolved the candy. For our experiments we decided to try warm water, salt water, vinegar and soda. You can also use oil, milk, lemon juice; just whatever non-toxic liquids you have around the house.
I let Jack make the salt water while I poured the rest of the liquids in small glass bowls. I also placed a paper towel underneath each bowl with the appropriate label so we would know what was in each container. Jack then placed the creme pumpkins in each bowl so it was completely covered with the liquid and we let them stand for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes I let him remove the candies with a pair of tongs and we compared the sizes of the candies as well as the amount of orange coloring in each bowl.
For round two, we refreshed the liquids and then placed a jelly-style pumpkin in each bowl and again let them sit for 10 minutes. When we pulled these out we noticed two things. The first, was that the jelly pumpkins did not seem to be as affected by the liquids, they were still pretty much intact. The second observation was that there was some type of white, filmy substance clinging to them. That may have been the sugar coating trying to dissolve, which may have also protected the candy in general.
I asked Jack beforehand to predict which liquid would be the best/worst at dissolving the candy. We now went back to the whiteboard to compare the results. Jack believed that the vinegar would be the best, while I predicted the salt water would be better. We were both wrong. Plain old warm water was the best at dissolving the candies. This opened up a conversation about water being a universal solvent. Next week are going to collect some leaves and learn about how leaves change color in the fall. Happy Autumn!
Click one of the links to see a short video of the experiments in action (Pumpkin Towers or Dissolving Pumpkins) Next week we are going up north to collect some leaves and do an experiment to learn about how leaves change color in the fall. Happy Autumn!