Buoyancy Bonanza!

During Science class today we explored the concept of buoyancy. The students learned that buoyancy is a force that pushes up on an object in water. They learned that the denser the object, the less buoyant it will be. We then had some fun testing the buoyancy of a variety of objects starting with an unpeeled orange and an unpeeled mandarin.

They floated! The students then predicted whether peeled oranges would float...

They didn't float! We discovered that the peel has a lot of air in it and acts like a life-jacket for the orange. When we took its life-jacket peel off though - the oranges sunk!

I then asked the students if they thought a can of Diet Coke would float...it did! I then asked them if they thought a can of regular Coke would float. A few of the students predicted that it wouldn't and I asked them why. Neela thought maybe it was because the ingredients were different...like maybe there was more salt in Coke. Garven figured Neela was on the right track but he figured it was sugar. Well we put our theories to the test and discovered that...

The regular Coke did sink! We then Googled that a can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar in it! That is 10 teaspoons of sugar! No wonder it sank!

We then had a bit of time to test the buoyancy of different classroom objects!

Alrizha, Braeden and Neela compared the buoyancy of their personal pencil sharpeners and discovered that only Neela's wasn't buoyant - the other two are larger and not as dense as Neela's blue sharpener!