Experimental MumScience + Children = Fun + Mess

This is one of  our favourite experiments, the kids like the farty noise and the dog likes the leftovers!

If you feel the need to re-create your own fart in a jar, here’s what you’ll need.

What You Need:

• An adult helper, to handle the hot water
• A strong glass bottle (we used a Tesco value brown sauce bottle)
• Some boiled eggs with shell removed
• A bowl containing a little bit of water
• Kettle of hot water

What To Do:

• Shell the boiled egg and leave it sitting in the bowl of water until required
• Carefully pour the hot water into the bottle and leave it to heat the bottle for a few minutes
• Carefully pour the hot water out of the bottle
• Quickly place the egg (pointy end down) over the opening of the bottle
• In a couple of minutes the egg should land in the bottle with a PLOP!

What’s Going On:

Before you start the experiment, the air pressure is the same inside the bottle and outside it.

You heat up the bottle with the hot water and when you pour the water out, warm air fills the empty bottle.

As the bottle cools, so the air inside cools. The cold air now in the bottle cannot provide the same pressure, but no new air can enter the bottle because the egg is in the way.

The air pressure outside the bottle is now greater than the air pressure inside it. The air above pushes down on the bottle and is stronger than the air inside. The egg – as it’s in the way – gets pushed down too causing it to drop in.

Once the egg is through the neck, air rushes into the bottle to equalise the pressure.

Friday morning, my daughter Erynn didn’t want to go to school. We’d had a few sunny days and I think she just wanted to stay home and play. She had a definite “Friday” feeling!

Desperation in her voice she said, “But, Mam, why do i have to STILL go to school?”, “I can read now and do sums; I just don’t NEED to go anymore”. Oh, the world of a 6 year old!

I told her that we learn something new every day. “Well. what did you actually learn yesterday then!” was her charming response.

“Well, actually, I learnt how to embed videos into a Word Press blog!”

Now hurry up and get to school, so I can learn some more….

It started simply enough, I wanted to embed a video into my post.

Using the Word Press insert video function, I got an error message telling me that my file size was too small. I tried a tiny file but I didn’t like the way that Word Press created a link to the video rather than embedding the video directly into the post.

So I moved onto You Tube. I found it easy to use and pretty quick to upload. However, I didn’t like having links to similar videos at the end of my clip. What if there was something unsuitable for my intended audience there?

Next I tried Vimeo, but the upload time was so slow, I gave up.

I moved on to Blip.tv. Although my videos uploaded from my PC quickly and easy, they took an age to actually run in Word Press. They also had adverts along the footer, which I didn’t want.

Finally I tried Viddler. I liked this one from the beginning. I found it the most intuative to use and the clear dashboard view is a bonus. but most importantly, the videos loaded quickly and I love the neat format of the finished embeded clip.

Here’s to many more happy experimental videos….

Photo Credit: Reading in the Flowers by Norby

Next Time: A Lot of Science, in a Little Can…..