Week 11 Blog Post

                                         Week 11 Lab 04/09/2025

This week was our first week with our new instructor for the remainder of the semester, Dr. Jeffery Nordine. We started lab off this week by doing a short get to know you, then we worked on a variety of activities that were very thought provoking. 

In today's lab my group started off doing the M&M's in water experiment. The first thing that I noticed was that the orange M&M started leaking color the fastest. I also noticed that as the M&M's colors started leaking, they leaked towards the edge of the paper plate and they barely mixed at all. It looked like a rainbow since the colors hardly blended together. Some questions that I recorded while doing this activity was why do some colors leak faster than others? Why do the colors not really mix? Does the water temperature affect the rate of the color leaking? 

Next, we did the ice melting activity which was to see whether an ice cube melted faster in a room temperature pot or on a room temperature piece of wood. Going into this experiment, I fully expected the ice to melt faster on the slab of wood. However, as soon as we put the ice cube in the metal pot, it started melting while the one on the wood hardly melted. This confused me greatly as I was not expecting this to happen. It raised the question of why would an ice cube melt faster in a pot rather than on a piece of wood? My group thought that maybe it is because the wood absorbs the cold and becomes colder where a pot is meant to heat things up. We made the connection to how popsicles typically come on a wooden stick and it made us wonder if there is a connection between the two. 

Then we moved on to the plunger activity. Going into this activity we thought the plungers would stick good to the wall, the floor, and the tables. We predicted that the plunger would not stick good to the cardboard, chairs, or books on the shelf. Our predictions were proven correct, but why? We tried to come up with an answer to our question and came up with the reasoning behind why it didn't stick to the chairs, cardboard, or books and we believe this is because it is not air tight, and an air tight seal is necessary for the plunger to actually do the "plunging" motion. 

Moving on, we did the coke cans experiment. We had four cans of pop. Two diet cokes, one was a regular size, and one was a mini, and two cans of regular coke, one was regular size and the other was a mini. Then, we dropped them into a cooler filled with water. The regular sized regular coke sunk, and the regular sized diet coke floated. Then, we dropped the minis in, and to our surprise, both of them floated. We pushed them to the bottom to see if they would rise back up, and they did but the diet mini can rose significantly faster than the mini regular coke. Our group started to hypothesize why this happened and came up with a few ideas such as the sugar content, the amount of calories, the amount of pop in the cans, etc. But we were left with the questions of why do the mini cans rise? Why does the regular sized coca cola sink? This was a very interesting experiment. 

After we did the baking soda and vinegar in a plastic bag experiment. Before starting the experiment I knew that there would be some sort of fizz from my prior knowledge of the concoction of these two. Our group predicted this as well. However, what I did not know would happen would be the bag would start to slightly fill up with air almost like we blew in the bag and then shut it quickly. Also, we thought that due to the reaction between the two it would get hot, but it actually got cold. This raised some questions, why would it get cold and not hot? What was the air like substance filling up the bag? Was it gases released from the vinegar and baking soda reacting? Overall, this was one of my favorite activities of this lab. 

Last but not least, was the cold soda experiment. In this experiment we had two cans of soda that had been sitting in a cooler with ice, we pulled them out and watched them to see if we saw any condensation. We did not see really any condensation. This led us to wonder if it is the temperature of the room/outside that plays a role in whether a can will start making condensation rather than just the temperature of the can itself. 

As we finished up these activities we started talking about matter, what we know about matter and it's behaviors, and what we want to know going forward. This was a good refresher for me because I do not think I have thought about matter and it's four states since I was in early high school or middle school. 

Overall, all of the activities we did this week in lab are things that I will be able to use in my future career as a teacher. It is very important to have hands on activities in class that are thought provoking and these activities did just that and were enjoyable to do.