🍯 Kitchen liquid density tower: the whole packet

🍯 Kitchen liquid density tower · 4th–8th grade · 1 day of testing · about $2 · 75 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 which kitchen liquid is in the cup, then how many grams a quarter cup of it weighs will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

6 levels × 3 tries at each = 18 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🍯 Honey
• 🫙 Corn syrup
• 🫧 Dish soap
• 🥛 Milk
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🛢️ Cooking oil
• 🌈 Food colouring: 1 drop, for the water
• ⚖️ A kitchen scale
• 🥛 A measuring cup
• 🫙 A clear jar or tall glass: a tall clear glass
• 🥄 A spoon
• 🧽 A sponge or cloth, for wiping up

Be safe: 🚫 Not food · 🧽 A bit messy · 🚫 Test food is not for eating

1. Put the empty measuring cup on the kitchen scale and press zero.
2. Fill it to the quarter-cup line with honey, and write down the grams.
3. Scrape the honey back into its jar, rinse and dry the cup, and weigh a quarter cup two more times.
4. Weigh corn syrup, dish soap, milk, water and oil the same way, three times each.
5. Find the mean for each liquid, and put them in order, heaviest first.
6. Stir one drop of food colouring into the water, so it shows in the tower.
7. Pour a little of the heaviest liquid into the middle of a tall clear glass.
8. Pour each next liquid slowly down the back of a spoon, in your heaviest-first order.
9. Do the layers stack in the same order as your grams? Draw the tower and label it.
10. Draw a bar graph of the mean grams for each liquid.
11. The tower isn't for drinking: pour it away when you're done.

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

I changed: Liquid   I measured: how many grams a quarter cup of it weighs (grams)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: liquid along the bottom, grams 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: weigh each liquid cold from the fridge too, and draw cold and room-temperature bars side by side.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: do the heaviest liquids always sink to the bottom?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing which kitchen liquid is in the cup would change how many grams a quarter cup of it weighs, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed which kitchen liquid is in the cup (Honey, Corn syrup, Dish soap, Milk, Water, Cooking oil) and measured how many grams a quarter cup of it weighs in grams.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same quarter-cup measure, filled to the line and the same kitchen scale, set to zero with the empty cup on it the same, so only which kitchen liquid is in the cup was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 6 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: Honey and Cooking oil 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: weigh each liquid cold from the fridge too, and draw cold and room-temperature bars side by side.