Racing Liquids

Today we had a ‘liquid race’!  We experimented with different liquids to see which ones were fast and which ones were slow.  We had to make a ‘hypothesis’ before we started and guess which ones we thought would be fast and which would be slow.  We also had to think about how to make it a ‘fair’ experiment and so decided that we would keep the board at the same angle every time and use the same amount of liquid dropped at the same place.  This was quite difficult so Miss Shearer dropped it down the board for us. 

The results were interesting! 

The water was the quickest – it took less than one second to reach the bottom of the board!  Mr MacLeod could hardly get the stopwatch clicked in the right time!  Of course we didn’t manage to get any photos of the water – it was too fast.

We also tested vegetable oil which only took 5 seconds to reach the bottom.  Most of us thought that these two liquids would be the quickest. 

Next up was golden syrup.  Quite a lot of us thought this would be a slow moving liquid but were very surprised that it only took around 2 minutes to reach the bottom of the board.  Quite a few of us were interested in taste testing it as well!

The spoonful of shampoo took a record 10 minutes to reach the bottom of the board – we had to watch it very closely to ensure it was moving.

Finally we tested the tomato sauce and as predicted it took a very long time to reach the bottom of the board! So long in fact we had to go to a Pantomime Practice.  Around 40 minutes later it had reached the bottom of the board in one big blob! 

This was a great experiment and it was interesting to look back at our hypothesis and what would thought would happen at the beginning.  We then wrote up our experiment in a scientific way using technical vocabulary and headings. 

We took a few photos but we were too involved in the experiment to remember to be photographers!