This experiment made the afternoon very interesting. In this experiment we are making a different kind of goo. I first took one eight-ounce bottle of Elmer’s Glue and emptied it into a bowl. Then, filling it half-way with warm water, I shook the bottle and then poured the contents into the bowl.
In a plastic cup I put in a half cup of warm water and mixed a heaping teaspoonful of borax. While I was mixing the glue, my little brother helped me pour in the borax solution into the glue.
But I will tell you now that I did it wrong. I told my brother to pour in the solution in increments when we were supposed to pour it in slowly and consistently. Well the solution became rubbery and slimy! It brought back memories of dissection class.
It was certainly not the “putty like” goo Mr. Spangler had mentioned. So we put the slimy glob into a bag, labeled it “Elephant Snot”, and declared it an “Epic Fail”.
We cleaned up, reset, and redid the experiment correctly. As I was making the batch, it was sort of like our previous batch but a bit more “mixed up” I should say. We thought this was very unusual. So we looked at the “elephant snot” and realized that it had become much better in a putty-like sense. I guess it just needed to set and evaporate the extra water material. The second batch we made was a little better than the first batch. So the first batch wasn’t really an epic fail after all!
After that whole fiasco, I made a third batch but this time I added five drops of blue food coloring so, at the end of it all, I had blue putty. So I mixed the two putties, broke them in half, and mixed them again to make this lovely marble-like pattern.
I put the putty “rolling pin” on a cookie sheet and lifted one end of the pan with books.
I also taped a egg white separator in the path of the putty to see if it might make a fun pattern. Look at what it did.
The putty has a high viscosity so it took well over two hours to get from beginning to end. This is a experiment on polymers. A polymers is a long chain of molecules. When the molecules are wet they slide easily and they act like a liquid. So the putty flows easily. But if the water evaporates then the molecules stick together and so the putty flows more slowly!
That is the end of day 2! Four experiments down, seven more to go!
