June 13th, 2014....One Unlucky-Lucky day......

So, we were looking for pendulum stuff. And we came across this vid about service tension. (on khanacademy.org - go there for anything you ever wanted to know). And boy was the middle of our experiment hard! We had to do it a lot of times in order for it to work! But that's what science is.....

The beginning and the end were a success, so mission accomplished. Now we are doing our write-up.

We were trying to prove the Marangoni effect. The Marangoni effect explains surface tension. Like, how the water-bugs create air bubbles to walk across water. And this also happens with water lizards.

First, we cut out a boat out of cardboard that won't take in water. HINT: don't use cardboard - use styrofoam - styrofoam does not take up water and it works better.

this is the complete boat. little house with a key notch in front of me.

Then we filled a small bowl with soap. Any kind of soap is good - hand soap might work. Then we filled a big bowl with water. We put the big bowl of water - CAREFULLY!  You don't want your boat to do a nose dive. Then, we put some soap on the end of a q-tip and drop the soap on the q-tip on the circly part of the boat. WATCH!!!!! It will eject and will move around! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Y2WOCfXRM

The soap breaks the surface tension of the water and propels the boat along! Try it with black pepper and see what happens! Pretty cool!!!!

We're still gonna look for pendulum stuff on Monday. And we're gonna move our pendulum to the front yard so the wind can catch it. Right now it's not moving too much.......

This experiment was pretty fun! Hope you try it and I hope it works!!!

Stay tuned 'til Monday!

TO BE CONTINUED!!!