{"id":20054,"date":"2011-02-09T19:33:26","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T02:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/09\/popping-for-science.html"},"modified":"2011-02-09T20:57:56","modified_gmt":"2011-02-10T03:57:56","slug":"popping-for-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/09\/popping-for-science.html","title":{"rendered":"Popping for SCIENCE!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kay’s blue ribbon analysis of differently treated popcorn and how it affected the popping.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Well, if I say so myself, I think Katherine’s exhibit did one of the best jobs there of having hypothesis, predictions, explanations, and examinations of where the hypothesis didn’t work out. Plus … popcorn!<\/p>\n

Margie did a lot of helping her with the measuring and the experimenting, and I did the typing up and graphing (and finding of images), but Kay did most of the thinking and concluding and paste-up. It’s her last year at the Science Fair, and it was a success.<\/p>\n

Other popular themes this year: volcanoes (of course) and things getting moldy. No, really, there were probably five or size moldy food experiments. Interesting.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2: It occurs to me I didn’t record what the experiment was. \u00a0The question was, will popcorn subjected to different environments (frozen, sun-dried, soaked in water, age) pop differently and, if so, why? We took a quarter cup of each type of popcorn, and after some “control” runs to determine the optimal microwave time, zapped ’em.<\/p>\n

Results:
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Katherine figured that the sun-dried didn’t really get a chance to dry out because it was overcast for the week we had it on the front windowsill. She also figured out the soaked popcorn (which didn’t pop more as she predicted, thinking that the extra water would mean extra steam) failed because the husks got soft which let the steam “sneak out”; it was pretty bizarre-looking barely-poppedcorn.<\/p>\n

Fun stuff.<\/p>\n

Past years:<\/p>\n