Science Fairs and Gummy Bears

This semester my class was assigned to create a Science fair project to bring to the Science Fair at Bishop Dunn Memorial School. Before we created our experiment and came up with our big question, we got to judge the middle school science fair. Judging the science fair in my opinion was more fun than making my own science fair project. Some of the middle schoolers had projects that were way beyond their years of intelligence. Some of the projects also inspired my project that you see above.

The project I chose to do was Gummy Bear Osmosis. My experiment consisted of me seeing if gummy bears would grow or shrink when I put them in different types of water. First I measured and weighed the gummy bears. Next, I measured out the water for each cup. I did two cups with pure water and two cups with salt water just to make sure my results were accurate. I placed the gummy bears in the cups and I left them for 24 hours. I checked them every few hours just to see if they were growing or shrinking. The gummy bears that were placed in pure water were starting to grow within the first few hours. The gummy bears placed in salt water, it was hard to see a difference at all.

My hypothesis was "If a gummy bear is placed in pure water, then it will grow. If a gummy bear is placed in salt water, then it will shrink." After 24 hours I took the gummy bears out and remeasured and reweighed them. My hypothesis of the gummy bear that was placed in pure water was correct. Those gummy bears doubled, possibly tripled in size. My hypothesis of the gummy bears placed in salt water was wrong. I thought the gummy bears would shrink, but the gummy bears actually grew a little bit.

If I could do my science experiment again, I would place gummy bears in more than just pure and salt water. I would place the gummy bears in other liquids such as lemon water, vinegar, oil and even milk. I would repeat the experiment the same way and see what gummy bear is the biggest at the end, which is the smallest at the end, and if some gummy bears have no change in size and weight at all.

Judging the science fair was something I would love to do again. It was so heart warming to see some of the children's eyes fill with passion as they told me about their projects, why they chose to do it and their trials and errors of each. Pictured below are two of the student projects that really stood out to me. They were well designed and far beyond the knowledge of what their peers did. These projects left me utterly impressed.