🧊 Salt or sugar in ice water: the whole packet

🧊 Salt or sugar in ice water · 2nd–6th grade · 1 day of testing · free · 45 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 what is stirred into the ice water, then how cold the ice water gets after 10 minutes 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

• 🧊 Ice cubes, all from the same tray: 18 cubes for each round
• 🥛 Clear plastic cups, all the same size: 3, the same size
• 🧊 Cold water from the fridge: half a cup for each cup
• 🥛 A measuring cup
• 🧂 Salt: 2 tablespoons for each round
• 🍬 Sugar: 2 tablespoons for each round
• 🥄 Measuring spoons
• 🥄 A spoon
• 🌡️ A thermometer (digital, or the red-liquid kind)
• ⏱️ A stopwatch or a kitchen timer
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines

Be safe: 💧 Water · 🚫 Test food is not for eating

1. Label three cups with tape: nothing, sugar and salt.
2. Put six ice cubes and half a cup of cold water in each cup.
3. Stir two tablespoons of sugar into the sugar cup and two of salt into the salt cup.
4. Start the timer, and stir each cup ten times every two minutes.
5. At 10 minutes, hold the thermometer in each cup for 30 seconds, then read it.
6. Write the three temperatures in your table, rinsing the thermometer between cups.
7. Pour everything away and do it twice more with fresh ice.
8. Draw a bar graph with one bar for each cup.

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

I changed: What goes in   I measured: how cold the ice water gets after 10 minutes (degrees)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: what goes in along the bottom, degrees 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: try one, two and three tablespoons of each, and graph a line for salt and a line for sugar.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which makes ice water colder: salt or sugar?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing what is stirred into the ice water would change how cold the ice water gets after 10 minutes, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed what is stirred into the ice water (Nothing, Sugar, Salt) and measured how cold the ice water gets after 10 minutes in degrees.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept two tablespoons in every cup that gets something and six ice cubes and half a cup of cold water in every cup the same, so only what is stirred into the ice water 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: Nothing and Salt 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: try one, two and three tablespoons of each, and graph a line for salt and a line for sugar.