Monday: Today was the first day that we could working on our own projects. The options of things you could research, experiment or make is almost limitless. So at first it was really hard for me to come up with wanted to do because their so much freedom. After a while of looking at ideas in the internet and talking to classmates I decided that I wanted to make rock candy, along with Maia, Indigo, Audrey E. and Natalie. First we had to get it approved with Andrew. There is a picture of our proposal bellow. Our essential question was "What are the phases of mater that are present while making rock candy?" We found a website that explained how to make it in detail the we would base our experiment off of. Here is the website we are going to use We researched about the safety procedures for hot plates because we would be using them during this project. Near the end of class we got approved by Andrew. Andrew told us that all the students who had tried to make rock candy there crystals did not form and the solvent just sat there and nothing happened. I believe that we can do it though! We agreed to bring our project supplies tomorrow so we could get right into our project. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Rock-Candy
Tuesday: We brought in the supplies for our project today. The supplies were actually really easy to get mostly stuff you can find around the house.The first rock candy we started was Indigo's and Audrey's. We first heated one cup of water on a hot plate we let it sit there until it started to stem. Next we added two cups of granulated sugar we lowered the heat to 2 and stirred it until it became a solvent which means the all the sediment was dissolved into the water in a liquid or syrup like substance. This liquid is a supper saturated solution because there is twice as much sugar then water. After we made this solution we carefully poured it into a glass jar we got a Popsicle stick and tied a cotton sting to it. The string goes inside of the solvent and the popsicle stick sits on top of the jar. We also added some purple food coloring for effect. I researched the way the crystal candy is formed and I found out that the way it crystallized is the water evaporates leaving the caramelized sugar behind the particles attach to the sting in a crystallized form. I am still a bit vague on how it works. But I'm sure as the project goes on I will understand it better. It said on the website that this process will take a long time you might not see results until 3 days into it can take up 2 weeks we hope that, that won't be a problem for us. Tomorrow the rest of our group will make our rock candy I am very exited to make one of my own.
Wednesday: I got to make my rock candy today it was a similar process to Indigo's exept I chose to make mine a little more saturated then hers. I wanted to experiment with the ways we made it to see what method worked best. I also tried to see if I could make a different effect with food coloring then just a solid color I tried to add blue and pink a drop on each side of the jar. I mixed it a little bit but the two colors did not mix together because the solution was so saturated. I am hopping that when it crystalizes each sugar particle will absorb a different color making a really cool looking effect. After watching Audrey and Indigo make theirs yesterday it was really easy for me to make mine. I put tin foil over it and we put our rock candy in a cubby. Then we decided to add flavoring to our rock candy, mine smells like strawberries. Andrew added it in for us using a dropper he explained to us that artificial flavoring is mainly a sweet sent not a taste, to get taste you have to add sour to balance out the sweet sent. To do that to our rock candy we will add some citric acid to the candy to get that sour taste. I thought that was really interesting I did not now that about candy. Because my group had more time we decided to make one extra group made rock candy jar for this one we did not add any flavoring like a controlled experiment we also changed the ratio of sugar to water to 3:1. Now it is time to wait for our crystals to form.
Thursday: Today at the begging of class we had a mini lesson on the core concept measurements. We learned a lot about units, science, prefixes and how to use the exponential form. It was a bit confusing to me at first because I'm not that good at math. But I asked for help from Jenessa and I understand it better now.
What do you think happened? Looking Beyond:
After the lesson I deiced to research more of the science of rock candy. I read this article:http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/past-issues/archive-2014-2015/candymaking.html it was really interesting to actually learn about why rock candy forms the way it does. Here are some of the main points I took away from this article: If we could see sugar on a molecular level each grain of sugar consists of a small crystal that has solid molecules set up in a orderly arrangement called sucrose. When you add granulated sugar to water some of the sucrose molecules start to break apart from each other. As you concentrate the granulated sugar the less the sugar devolves and the more it crystalizes. Once a saturated formula starts to cool down it becomes a supersaturated formula. A supersaturated solution is unstable it contains more solute that can stay in the solution, so as the solution cools down the sugar slowly comes out of the solution forming crystals. There is a digram of that happening at a molecular level bellow.
Tuesday: We brought in the supplies for our project today. The supplies were actually really easy to get mostly stuff you can find around the house.The first rock candy we started was Indigo's and Audrey's. We first heated one cup of water on a hot plate we let it sit there until it started to stem. Next we added two cups of granulated sugar we lowered the heat to 2 and stirred it until it became a solvent which means the all the sediment was dissolved into the water in a liquid or syrup like substance. This liquid is a supper saturated solution because there is twice as much sugar then water. After we made this solution we carefully poured it into a glass jar we got a Popsicle stick and tied a cotton sting to it. The string goes inside of the solvent and the popsicle stick sits on top of the jar. We also added some purple food coloring for effect. I researched the way the crystal candy is formed and I found out that the way it crystallized is the water evaporates leaving the caramelized sugar behind the particles attach to the sting in a crystallized form. I am still a bit vague on how it works. But I'm sure as the project goes on I will understand it better. It said on the website that this process will take a long time you might not see results until 3 days into it can take up 2 weeks we hope that, that won't be a problem for us. Tomorrow the rest of our group will make our rock candy I am very exited to make one of my own.
Wednesday: I got to make my rock candy today it was a similar process to Indigo's exept I chose to make mine a little more saturated then hers. I wanted to experiment with the ways we made it to see what method worked best. I also tried to see if I could make a different effect with food coloring then just a solid color I tried to add blue and pink a drop on each side of the jar. I mixed it a little bit but the two colors did not mix together because the solution was so saturated. I am hopping that when it crystalizes each sugar particle will absorb a different color making a really cool looking effect. After watching Audrey and Indigo make theirs yesterday it was really easy for me to make mine. I put tin foil over it and we put our rock candy in a cubby. Then we decided to add flavoring to our rock candy, mine smells like strawberries. Andrew added it in for us using a dropper he explained to us that artificial flavoring is mainly a sweet sent not a taste, to get taste you have to add sour to balance out the sweet sent. To do that to our rock candy we will add some citric acid to the candy to get that sour taste. I thought that was really interesting I did not now that about candy. Because my group had more time we decided to make one extra group made rock candy jar for this one we did not add any flavoring like a controlled experiment we also changed the ratio of sugar to water to 3:1. Now it is time to wait for our crystals to form.
Thursday: Today at the begging of class we had a mini lesson on the core concept measurements. We learned a lot about units, science, prefixes and how to use the exponential form. It was a bit confusing to me at first because I'm not that good at math. But I asked for help from Jenessa and I understand it better now.
What do you think happened? Looking Beyond:
After the lesson I deiced to research more of the science of rock candy. I read this article:http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/past-issues/archive-2014-2015/candymaking.html it was really interesting to actually learn about why rock candy forms the way it does. Here are some of the main points I took away from this article: If we could see sugar on a molecular level each grain of sugar consists of a small crystal that has solid molecules set up in a orderly arrangement called sucrose. When you add granulated sugar to water some of the sucrose molecules start to break apart from each other. As you concentrate the granulated sugar the less the sugar devolves and the more it crystalizes. Once a saturated formula starts to cool down it becomes a supersaturated formula. A supersaturated solution is unstable it contains more solute that can stay in the solution, so as the solution cools down the sugar slowly comes out of the solution forming crystals. There is a digram of that happening at a molecular level bellow.
Blog Prompts:
What Happened- We attempted to make rock candy. And learn the science behind it. (for more details of the process day by day look at the posts above)
Lab Practice:
What Happened- We attempted to make rock candy. And learn the science behind it. (for more details of the process day by day look at the posts above)
Lab Practice:
Here is a slide show of some of the pictures we took during the process. I will add one final quick blog post to mention how our rock candy looks when it is finished crystalizing.