Monday: Today we learned about what types of experiments, activities, and lessons we could do in order to earn our full 250 points. Together, a few of my friends and I thought about what experiments we could do. We eventually came up with the idea of making rock candy. After coming up with this idea, we had to fill out a planning sheet. We are each creating our own jar of rock candy, so its individual in that sense, but we are all working together as a group and helping each other along the way. Tomorrow we are going to begin the rock candy making process. Below is a picture of the proposal form I filled out on my experiment. Tuesday: Today is the first day of our rock candy making experiment! Yesterday we all planned out what supplies to bring and researched what steps we needed to take to properly create the rock candy. We found a nice tutorial online here: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Rock-Candy/ that showed us how to create the candy. Here is a list of the supplies we needed to create the candy: mason jar, cotton string, stick, spoon, pot for a stove, sugar and water. After gathering all the supplies, we started making the candy. I put a small cooking pot with 1 cup of water in it, on top of a hot plate and turned the power up to ten. We then waited for the water to steam and lowered the power down to three as we stirred in 2 cups of sugar. Once the sugar was fully dissolved into the water, we poured it into a mason jar. After our hot mixture was poured in the jar, we added food coloring. We then took a cotton string and tied it to the middle of a wooden popsicle stick. Next, we lowered the string into the mixture and it was held in place by the stick resting over the top of the jar. Then we covered the jar with foil and placed it in a cubby so it wasn't disturbed in the crystallization process. According to the tutorial online, the mixture will crystalize onto the string within a week. From now until next Tuesday, we have to leave our jars alone, but we will check on them each day. Unfortunately today, we only had time to do Indigo and Audrey Ensworth's rock candy mixtures, but tomorrow we will do me, Audrey Sutton, Natalie's mixtures. Tuesday Night: I forgot that I was going to have to leave school early on Wednesday, and therefore I would miss chemistry class. This means that I wouldn't be able to make my candy and would be behind. So tonight I decided to make my rock candy at home. I followed the same process as stated above, but at my house I only had one cup of sugar left. So I shortened the recipe to a 1/2 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar. My rock candy mixture still seemed to be a success and I brought it in to school the next day to store it. Wednesday: Today I brought my jar into class and stored it with my other teammates rocky candy mixtures. While I was gone today my group added flavoring to our candy mixtures so that it will taste even better when it is finished! Some of the flavors our group used was strawberry, watermelon, and peach. I chose to have mine peach flavored and my group members were very nice and put the flavoring in for me while I was gone. Today was the final day of making the rock candy mixtures, and now all we can do is wait the full seven days to see how they turn out. Once the candy starts to show signs of crystallization, I will post pictures.
Here is a picture of all our rock candy mixtures being stored in the cubby:
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