11 Favorite Candy Experiments

Do you need a fun way for kids to celebrate Halloween and learn science? If so, try some of these candy science experiments to get your candy bubbling, spouting, sparking, sinking, and separating!

Here’s a list of eleven favorite candy experiments from all over the internet.

1. Sour Candy Bubble Test

Sour candy contains acid, which causes the sour taste. With the Acid Test candy experiment, You can test for the acid by dissolving the candy and adding baking soda to make a bubbling reaction.

You can do this with any type of candy, but it’s especially fun with Pixy Stix and Warheads!

2. Floating M&Ms

Need a Halloween magic trick? Drop some M&M’s in a glass of water and watch the letters. In a few minutes, the M’s will start floating!

3. Marshmallow Sink

Can you sink a marshmallow? Take the Marshmallow Challenge to find out!

A marshmallow contains tiny air bubbles, which puff it out to make it less dense than water. To make it sink, you must make the marshmallow denser than water by making it smaller. Smash the marshmallow to break the air bubbles, then roll it into a ball. If you make it small enough, it will sink.

4. Life Saver Lights

For this experiment, which the Exploratorium calls “Lighting In Your Mouth,” you need a dark room, a mirror, and a pack of wintergreen LifeSavers. Stand in front of the mirror and start chewing the LifeSavers. You will see sparks of light as the energy from the chewing motion rips electrons off of the sugar molecules, then recombines them to release flashes of light.

This also works with other wintergreen sugar candies, such as Altoids.

5. Candy Color Separation

Chromatography lets you separate candy colors so you can see what dyes have been mixed together.

To do chromatography, cut a strip of paper from a coffee filter. Wet a colored candy, such as a brown M&M, and dab a spot of color near the bottom of the paper. Stand up the paper up in glass with a half-inch of water, and watch as the colors rise up the paper.

6. Chocolate Bloom

When chocolate blooms, the cocoa butter begins to separate from the cocoa solids. Eventually the cocoa butter can form complex patterns of white crystals.

7. Dancing Gummy Frankenworms

For the Dancing Gummy Frankenworms experiment, you can make gummy worms dance by slicing them into strips, soaking them in baking soda water, then dropping them in vinegar. The bubbles will hold the pieces up so they dance!

8. Giant Gummies

Make your gummy worms grow to double their length with the Giant Gummies experiment. Just put them in water and wait for two days to see how big they get.

9. Bubbling Pop Rocks

To find the secret ingredient in Pop Rocks, put them in water and watch what happens. As the candy dissolves, it releases tiny trapped air bubbles that float to the surface.

10. Melting Races

If you really want to see what your candy is made of, cover a cookie sheet with aluminum foil, line up different types of candy, and heat in the oven at 300 degrees to see what happens. For instance, you’ll see oil spots form on Starbursts, candy bars melt away from their fillings, and taffy turn translucent as the air bubbles contained inside rise to the surface and disappear.

11. Mentos Coke Geyser

One of the internet’s favorite candy experiments, the Mentos Coke geyser lets you send coke spouting into the air. Try it with Diet Coke, and wear clothes that can get wet!

For more fun ideas on how to experiment with candy, check out the candyexperiments.com experiments page!

Marshmallow Construction

At this booth, put on by Operation Smart of girls inc., people were challenged to see how tall of a tower they could construct with marshmallows and toothpicks. They hoped people would start experimenting with different designs and see which were stronger.

For anyone who wants to try this with their kids, here's an online lesson plan from www.sciencedays.org that gives a little more information.

Here's the beginning of a tower:

For me, the most important thing in this picture was the water bottle. I could certainly relate--hours and hours of teaching experiments is hard on the voice!

Here's a finished tower.

USASEF: The NASA/Design Squad Marshmallow Astronauts

A spacecraft shuttling astronauts to the moon has two challenges. First, it has to slow from 18,000 miles per hour to a safe landing speed. Then it needs to land gently enough to keep the astronauts safe. This challenge, sponsored by NASA/Design Squad at USASEF, was to build a landing craft that could absorb the shock of a landing without bouncing out all the little marshmallow astronauts. (These instructions are adapted from the NASA/Design Squad Touchdown handout.)

Materials:
1 piece of stiff paper or cardboard (about 4*5 in)
1 small paper cup (this holds the astronauts)
3 index cards
2 regular marshmallows (these are the astronauts)
10 miniature marshmallows
3 rubber bands
8 plastic straws
scissors
tape


Build
1. Design a shock-absorbing system (think springs and cushions).
2. Build spacecraft by attaching shock absorbers to the cardboard platform.
3. Tape the cup to the cardboard platform to hold the astronauts. Cup must be right-side up, with no lid--no cheating!


Test
Drop the lander from the height of one foot. If the astronauts fall out, modify your design. For instance, you can
--make sure the weight is evenly balanced so that the lander doesn't tip the astronauts out
--add soft pads or change shock absorbers so astronauts don't bounce out.

The "landers" I saw also had fins or paper wings, which slowed them down as they fell. This must be simulating an Earth landing, as the moon has no atmosphere to slow down a lander, no matter how many wings it has!

More info about the sponsors at:
pbs.org/designsquad
nasa.gov

USASEF 2012

Well, we made it to and through the USA Science and Engineering Festival once again. As before, kids played the "Marshmallow Game," in which they tried to sink marshmallows by squashing them to learn about density, showed all the colors that make up M&M brown, demonstrated how sour Warheads bubble when dropped in baking soda water, and let kids weigh candy to find the hidden candy in their other foods. Good moments:

--Every time a child stared at the 10 rolls of Smarties that match the sugar contents of one bottle of orange soda

--The kids who were so interested in their chromatography papers that they took them home

--Every time a parent read our blinding orange sign to their kids, so we didn't have to waste our voices repeating the message: "The candy is for experiments, not for eating!"

--The mother who learned that brown M&Ms actually contain red dye, when she'd always told her dye-sensitive children that brown was all right because it was made of chocolate

--Watching my family members, as well as a bunch of super volunteers, step up to demonstrate these exciting experiments.

This picture gives you only a small idea of just how big the convention center was. We were near the back of the room, nearly halfway down, so there were almost as many booths stretching out on the other side from us as well. One report said that USASEF attracted so many people, it made the second biggest crowd ever to fill the convention center. I'll believe it--it was very crowded!

Everybody joined in the fun--family members, friends, and even my kids. For awhile, my four-year-old was the only person manning the Sink a Marshmallow station. She had the basics exactly right: Squash the marshmallow enough to sink it; if you sink it, you get to try a big marshmallow.

I also found some new candy experiments as I was wandering around. Check back for details!

Stale Peeps Test

A friend of mine was recently given 2 enormous boxes of stale Peeps. What to do with them? Well, I could think of a few things. Like testing them in the microwave.

The verdict: stale Peeps don't expand nearly as much in the microwave as fresh ones. Here's proof. (The stale Peeps are the ones on the left.)

Shrinking Ghosts

If you're going to test marshmallows, you've got to use some Peeps out of principle. Here are some really spooky Halloween ghosts--they shrink by themselves.

We took an empty plastic bottle, drilled a hole in the lid, and stuck in a basketball air pump, wrapping rubber bands around the pump insert to help create a seal.  Though the seal wasn't perfect, we were able to pump in enough air to increase the pressure in the bottle, and sink our ghosts.


The eerie moaning isn't ghostly howling, it's air escaping from our leaky bottle.

"They're Getting Smaller and Dancing!"

How do you squash a marshmallow without touching it? All you need is a bottle, a pump, and an MIT engineer. Check it out: