Activities & Days Out / 5 April, 2020 / Nanny Anita

Skittles Science Experiment

Do you ever see a craft or activity online and think “I have to do that?” (I hope that at least some of my things do that). Well I saw this skittles science experiment and had that moment! It is soooo cool, I still don’t understand the science behind it, but that is not going to bother a child, they will honestly think you are the coolest person around with this skittles science experiment.

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You will need:

• Skittles
• Water
• A bowl

Before we started the experiment we talked about what they thought might happen and made some hypothesis. We also talked about what a hypothesis is, EC had a long think before saying it was guessing what was going to happen. Which is pretty much spot on. A hypothesis is basically an educated guess that can be tested out in an experiment, but obviously it doesn’t sound very scientific if we say, “I guess that this is going to happen”, and as we were being scientist we needed to use the proper terminology. Here are our hypotheses:

YC: “I think that my skittles will float in the water.”

EC: “I think that all the colour will come off my skittles.”

We also talked about what sort of water we should use and how much we should add; both of them agreed that it should be hot water and that we needed quite a lot of water.

They chose 5 skittles each and arranged them around the outside of their bowl, then I poured in the hot water. Almost immediately the colour began to run and there were squeals of delight from both of them, followed by “Knita, come and see! Look what mine is doing”. It didn’t take very long at all for all the colour to run.

Now this is the truly cool part, the colours didn’t mix! They stayed completely separated. I have looked for a satisfactory explanation of why this happened, but so far I haven’t found one. If anyone knows the answer please tell me.

Even when they get slightly disturbed, the colours don’t mix!

When they had finished playing with their concoction, and had turned the water a lovely muddy colour, we looked back at our hypothesis. Although YC’s had been proved wrong, that didn’t matter, because we still learnt something from it; that skittles don’t float!

The colours do mix when you stick your hand in and mix them though.

As we had used hot water the first time around, we decided to try it again (yes, it really is that cool we had to do it again), but this time using room temperature water. Although the colour still came off, it was slower to do so. Although it was slower to dissolve, it did give us a chance to see the ‘s’ come off and float to the surface of the water.

Our final thing to do was see if the colour would come off the skittle if we put it in our mouth and let it sit on our tongue. Of course, they were just as eager to eat the skittles, as they were to experiment with.

EC showing me his red tongue.

Both YC and EC love doing science experiments, but this one seems to be their new favourite. Stay tuned because I have other things planned to do with skittles, that I am sure will delight everyone.

YC trying to mix her colours by blowing at them.

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