🍞 Bread and toaster browning: the whole packet

🍞 Bread and toaster browning · 4th–8th grade · 1 day of testing · about $3 · 50 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

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

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I 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

Be safe: 🔌 Plugs in · 🚫 Test food is not for eating

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.

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Bread   I measured: how much browner the slice gets in the toaster (brown score, 0 to 5)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: bread along the bottom, brown score, 0 to 5 up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: 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.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which bread turns the brownest in the toaster?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the kind of bread would change how much browner the slice gets in the toaster, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed the kind of bread (White, Whole wheat, A sweet bread, like brioche) and measured how much browner the slice gets in the toaster in brown score, 0 to 5.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same toaster, on the same setting, in the same slot and slices the same thickness the same, so only the kind of bread was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: White and A sweet bread, like brioche gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd 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.