Dance Party!

Dance Party! from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

We conducted the first half of our first science experiment of the year! We wondered what would happen to raisins when we put them into bubbly water. Some of our colleagues predicted they would pop out of the water and fly through the air. Some predicted they would turn into grapes again! Some predicted they would float on the water.

To make this a good experiment, we conducted a fair test. We will be talking a lot about fair tests as the lab year goes on, but in a nutshell, a fair test involves a repeatable, specific procedure, so that all results are controlled for external variables and everyone's data can be compared. For this experiment, we decided to use the same quantity of water, the same containers, the same number of raisins (8), and to drop the raisins into the cup one at a time from the height of the rim of the cup.

Tomorrow, we will conduct a control test, with plain water, to see if the bubbles make the raisins act differently than they would in normal water. We also had other questions we were wondering about, such as: Will the raisins plump up into grapes eventually? Why do the raisins that float to the top then sink? How come some of the raisins never float?