🍞 Which bread turns the brownest in the toaster?

My hypothesis

If I change the kind of bread, then how much browner the slice gets in the toaster will ______, because ______.

🔊 You fill in the blanks. Think about what is in each bread besides flour, and what heat does to sugar. A guess is a good because: the test finds out.

Change, measure, keep the same

Scientists call the thing you change the independent variable and the thing you measure the dependent variable. The things you keep the same are the controls: if one of them changed too, you wouldn't know which change made the difference. Try each of the 3 levels 3 times.

What you need

• 🍞 Sliced bread: 3 slices of each kind
• 🔌 A toaster, for the grown-up
• 🍽️ Small plates or saucers, all the same: 1
• 📄 Paper
• 🖍️ Crayons or markers: brown and yellow

Steps

1. Colour a brown scale on paper: 0 is pale, untoasted bread and 5 is very dark brown.🔊
2. Give every slice a brown score before it's toasted, and write it down.🔊
3. Grown-up: A grown-up sets the toaster to the middle setting and toasts the white slice.🔊
4. Once it has cooled on a plate, give it a brown score and write it down.🔊
5. Grown-up: A grown-up lets the toaster cool for two minutes, then toasts the whole wheat slice.🔊
6. Grown-up: A grown-up toasts the sweet bread the same way, and you score both slices.🔊
7. Grown-up: Do two more rounds with new slices, a grown-up working the toaster each time.🔊
8. Take each slice's before score from its after score: that's how much browner it got.🔊
9. Find the mean for each bread and draw a bar graph.🔊
10. The test toast isn't for eating: put it in the compost or the bin.🔊

4 steps are a grown-up's, marked above. Write each number down straight away, in the table below, so nothing is lost.

Your results table

From 4th grade, add the tries for each level and divide by how many there were: that's the mean, and it goes in the last column. Then draw a bar graph, one bar for each thing you tried.

Why it works

🔊 Toast turns brown when heat makes the sugars and proteins in bread join up into new, brown stuff, which scientists call the Maillard reaction. Bread with more sugar in it, like a sweet bread, usually browns faster at the same setting. Whole wheat starts out darker, which is why you score the change and not just the end colour.

Going further (7th and up): Change a second thing: have a grown-up toast each bread on the low, middle and high setting, and draw a line for each bread.

Board layout

This project at your grade

Every grade this project fits works out a mean. See every project for 4th grade, or print a blank results table.

What a judge will ask

• What did you change, and what did you measure? I changed the kind of bread and measured how much browner the slice gets in the toaster, in brown score, 0 to 5.
• What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? I kept the same toaster, on the same setting, in the same slot and slices the same thickness the same, so the only difference was the kind of bread.
• How many times did you test it? 3 times at each of my 3 levels.
• If you did it again, what would you change or test next? I'd have a grown-up toast each bread on the low, middle and high setting, and draw a line for each bread.

Make it yours

Keep this project on this device and Peabody counts down to your fair day, with a plan for each day. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Try next

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