Popping Proof...

Science Fair projects are fun once they are all finished! This year, while helping Ashlyn with her project, we all laughed a little way too much about the breaking popcorn machines, melting measuring cups, exploding popcorn that went everywhere in the kitchen, but mostly we laughed at the title of her project...she wanted to call it "Popping Proof" but while we were arranging the letters on the board I put one too many O's in the pop and so it became poop. Ashlyn could barely tell me my mistake because she was laughing so hard...then when she could get it out and said "Mom, it's not 'Pooping Proof" Kenna, Ash and I laughed like crazy and continued to laugh about that all throughout the evening. In the end we all learned a lot about how popcorn pops and had a lot of fun working together.

Ashlyn began her first experiment about a month before the deadline so she could gather all the data needed to come to a conclusion. We bought 3 different types of plastic wrap so she could test which plastic wrap would keep out evaporation and mold the best. After the first week...nothing. Second week...nothing and after the third week and still no results, except a little evaporation, we decided to scrap that project and find a fun and easy one. She decided to test how the temperature of a popcorn kernel impacts its pop. She put 100 kernels into the freezer, 100 into the fridge, 100 into the oven at 350F and 100 at room temperature then after an hour she gathered them together and popped them. She recorded the time the first kernel popped in each group, when they were done popping and how many unpopped kernels. She thought the popcorn in the freezer would have the fewest amount of unpopped kernels, but in the end it was the kernels at room temperature that popped the best with the least amount of unpopped kernels, tasted the best and looked the fluffiest. It was a fun project and in the end she won 2nd place! Whoo!