Scientific Method Mythbusters

Step one introduction. And you know what? We created awesome introduction for this experiment. We actually wrote it down. Why is this dim? Jen Steiger. You're wearing sunglasses. Here's your introduction. Mentos and Diet Coke is a combination that has often been talked about for many years. Because of its supposed exhilarating reaction when combined together, YouTube videos, MythBusters, even an episode of David Letterman, and many others have shown the reaction of an immediate foaming of the Coke creating a fountain like response or reaction. The height of the fountain and the length of the fountain seems to vary though from test to test, depending on different factors and variables. You don't see. Next relation of this reaction is also being discussed to many different degrees, carbon dioxide, Mentos, pits, or nucleation sites, word wall, where carbon dioxide bubbles form. The weight of the candy and the nature of the Coke itself all play a role in this reaction. 

Not having the opportunity to witness this reaction myself well, that's not really true of what we've had the opportunity to witness it. But we're pretending that we haven't experienced this ourselves. So not having the opportunity to witness this reaction myself, this carefully controlled experiment will hopefully answer the questions I have surrounding Mentos and Diet Coke and confirm the predictions that I have towards it. Now the next step in your scientific process is your purpose. Why am I doing this? The purpose of this experiment is to confirm the many reports of a reaction occurring when mixing, Mentos, with Diet Coke. The reaction being an immediate foaming of the Cola into a fountain like display, that's a nice display, the fountain likes. Hypothesis. If I place the original pack of Mentos original candy. Into a bottle of Diet Coke. It reaction of foaming and fountain like response would occur. More specifically, I predict the fountain to be about one. 

Meter in height, and last for approximately ten seconds. I believe this will happen for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my research tells me this is a common occurrence, and I've seen it happen through many videos. Cycling though, the reasoning behind the reaction seems very logical to me. The fact that the Mentos candy has many moonlight pits. Nucleation sites. For carbon dioxide bubbles to form, combine with the fact that the nature of Diet Coke being very gassy, you just said gassy. Gassy. And easy to form even by just shaking it, like we did with this one. No. It would seem reasonable for this fountain like reaction to an experiment. You're going to be dealing with several variables. Variables are things that might change. There are three different types. We have, first of all, your independent variable. In this case, the candy, the original mental mint candy versus a plain controlled kin. You also have dependent variables. 

In this case, this is the reaction once the candy is changed to mentors. We'll be looking at the height of the fountain and how long the fountain lasts. Those are our dependent variables. Lastly, you've got your controlled variables. They're controlled. Hence the name. Diet Coke, the size of the bottle, the number of the candies placed in the Coke, even the temperature or the wind might be a factor. Those are your controlled variables. Now onto the materials. So we have one pack of original mint Mentos candy, tic tacs. We have umbrellas. In case we do not want to get wet. Tonight we are meeting a variety of different people. We want to be very professional like. So we want to make sure that as always. So we do not want to be smelling like Diet Coke. So we need umbrellas which are out in the car. We don't have right now. Our one liter bottle, or two liter bottle of Diet Coke, we also have the stopwatch, which is very effective for measuring time. Yeah. We also have a sheet of paper. Those are hard to come by. You wouldn't believe. Yeah. Two meter sticks. 

To make sure we measure the height. And with those meter sticks, we are going to carefully be on a table. So we need table need to measure the. Keep rolling. Keep on. We will also be needing a cue card, no serious. Step one of your procedure is to set up your experiment by securing the bottle on the ground in a way that it won't tip over. Part of the potential reaction. There you go. Secure. Step two is to catch the paper and umbrella. We're throwing away in the wind, which is an inevitable problem. Done. Next, set up the meter sticks together vertically from the top of the bottle, using a hair clip. One part partner may want to stand on a table to achieve the height needed for the measurement. Okay, I got the table, safety first. Yeah. Step two. Unwrap the Mentos, candy, and place them in a similar position into a rolled up piece of paper. So I'm going to unwrap this. I don't want to lose them. You'll notice folks that we didn't prepare any of this ahead of time. Because we wanted to show you the struggles that you too might face. Yes. Good point. As an inherent part of this experiment. Okay, so that's all. Don't want to leave any garbage there. A similar position. It's similar. 

Next, you want to open the Diet Coke for the first time. Make sure it's a fresh bottle. Don't use one that you have previously consumed. Now this is for the control, right? First, absolutely. So we're going to start with our tic tacs. Okay, we don't really need to put it in there because they're small enough, I can just drop them. How many stand the procedure is we have to member, make sure you say exactly how many of each approximately one full package of tic tacs. To be more precise, that many. Losing all your tic tacs. Now, open. Yes, open the Diet Coke for the first time. You heard that, eh? That's satisfying sound. Okay. Now you want to carefully place the cue card over the top of that model. This is how you can carefully you want to go on here. And accurately. You want to stand up there and no. Have the stopwatch ready for immediate reaction. Ready? And start. Start to stop watch once the fountain overflowing starts. Time how long it will last. Score will be recorded into a quantitative observation table. It's going pretty good. Wow. Isn't this interesting that a TikTok would do this as well? I wouldn't exactly call this a fountain like response. Right, it's not so much a fountain, but there definitely is a reaction. Definitely there's timing. But as you can see, there's not much of a height looks like we got about it probably reach what three centimeters. 

I would say a fair estimate. Okay, so three centimeters. And we got 52 seconds. On our reading. So 52 seconds of length, three centimeters is the height of our control. So it was just interesting to know that there is a reaction to tic tacs. So we're going to make this second attempt, as you can see, our first method didn't really work out too well, the Mentos did not slide easily through the paper as what was in first anticipated. So just like any experiment, we are scientists. You guys are scientists expect mistakes, but science is all about learning from yours. So we're going to try this method. We're going to place the Mentos in the cue card and let it slide through the cue card. Are you already Salinger? I am. This wasp was interfering. Yeah, wasps. We're not too much of a fan here. So, okay, I will now gingerly deposit the Mentos into the Diet Coke and let them roll into the bottom. Well, the umbrella kind of trucks a lot of it in there. But I did get a reading. Well, that's excellent. Yes, it did reach at 198 centimeters. That's rain almost to the top. That's beautiful. 

After meeting people tonight, very important people precious people with our class I'm going to be smelling like welcome back mixed out your science fans. Well, we have returned from our epic experiment as we've seen. The results were outstanding. I happened to have here are quantitative data recorded on this Coke salt piece of paper. And so do you need this business for rules now? Yes. Thank you. What we have here is that the tic tacs in terms of duration, we had a 52 second reaction. Now, according to the height of the fountain of the tic tacs, about three centimeters. To contrast the original minimums of 5 second reaction and duration and the height was a distinct a 198 centimeters. Great precise 198 centimeters. I think what's really significant there is the tic tacs that fountain, if you can call it a fountain, lasted much longer, 52 seconds whereas Mentos lasted 25 seconds. That just tells us that the flow rate was so much greater with the Mentos. There was a lot more force, much more quicker. And obviously the height. I guess we'll do now the measurement for how much Coke is remaining. 

This was the tic tacs. So you can see there's still a lot more of the Diet Coke remaining inside the bottle and we'll just take these lovely cylinders that are really what's very unique. I don't know if you guys noticed it there when I was pouring it in. A lot of the tic tacs are still left in there. Which is kind of cool. So we have an additional. 900. So there's 19 100 mL of Diet Coke still left in that bottle. So even though the little tiny fountain lasts a long, not much of the cook escaped. Only a 100 mL. Now we have left the cop remaining after the Mentos reaction, and we're going to test and see if it is a greater or lower volume than what we saw with the tic tacs. I don't know if you're noticing this. Look how many of the mental are left. There's a lot of the Mentos candy still left in the container. You don't mix sounder. I just realized something. What's that? Watching the MythBusters video comparing original mental with the candy corded Mentos, they talked about how the original mentor was a big reason why you get the fountain is because of the all the little pits, the nucleation sites that we talked about in the introduction and the hypothesis, right? And how they compare with the candy cordova ones, there's a glaze around these. 

There's some kind of candy coated glaze around that so you don't get the pits or the nucleation sites with these. Correct. Confectioner's glaze, I believe. Yeah. But take a look at, I don't know if you noticed it, you can actually see them in here. All those little Mentos are still inside. They're still intact, which tells me that the fountain was created by the outer layer of the original Mentos. And then you know how Mentos candy on the inside, it's no more nucleation sites, I guess. There's not as many of that in the middle. So that just proves that point that it's the outer layer of the Mentos candy that makes this reaction. Absolutely. So in fact, the Coke is not actually having any contact with the internal structure. All right, so we've got looks like 610 mL left. Absolutely. 

So obviously, according to this, we have proven a huge fascinating point that Mentos candy and Diet Coke have a huge reaction. You take a look at our control with tic tacs, very little reaction, the Mentos candy, a huge reaction. When it comes to the amount of Coke left, the precise height of the fountain and the third one was the speed of the Mentos candy. It's very quick. So that was that's fantastic. Now, to add to your analysis gems dagger, I'd like to just explain a few things about our experiment setup. Now, we're scientists. So we acknowledge that sometimes things don't work out as anticipated. We thought we had a foolproof plan and clearly, as you could see, mistakes were made. But we rectified the situation, you know? We reflected on our mistakes and we made changes to our methods and our procedure in order to ensure the results that we were aiming to achieve. And so that was a good piece of two pieces of analysis. Why did the reactions occur and going over the errors? That's a fantastic analysis. So now in conclusion. Our friend back to our hypothesis, and again, I wrote up this nice little conclusion here. As I've mentioned previously, my hypothesis was correct and achieving a reaction between Mentos and Coke. However, the extent of their reaction is where I was incorrect.

If you want to rewind and go back to when we actually did the experiment, you could see me kneeling down on top of the table. I did not expect the reaction that we were going to get. I expected, what did I say, a 100 mL? Milliliters. Hundred centimeters. About a meter. Yes, indeed. Okay. Well, we got an estimated the height of length of the fountain. My hypothesis seems more like a prediction for a half pack. Which makes sense. Are you drinking that? No. Okay. Which would be a good extension of this experiment. So having an extension would be kind of neat of just measuring half a pack to see if my prediction, my hypothesis, would be for that, rather than the full pack, because the full pack equal almost two meters, half a pack, logically, would need a meter through the heist of fountain. Absolutely. Now, what a book some other extensions. Oh, boy. I mean, there's no end to the number of variables you could introduce. You could try a different brand of Cola. You could try regular Coca-Cola versus Diet Coke. 

You could introduce different types of candies even different flavors of Mentos. That's the scientific method. We just gave you a great example that is extremely precise with our measurements and what the way we went about the scientific method. That's mental. They're definitely was a reaction. And yeah, so review this video, review the scientific method, prepare yourself, make sure everything is prepared before you begin the experiment. And good luck on your next lap. We'll see this next time. We'll see you next time on another adventure of cyber science.