Surface Tension 2
Things You’ll Need:
Tall Glass
Water
Small Plastic or Metal Items (that will sink)
Doing the Experiment:
In this experiment, you will be exploring what surface tension does to water by
carefully observing a glass of water that has items placed into it. Hopefully you
learned a little bit about surface tension before doing the previous experiments
related to this same topic, so you won’t need to do much information gathering.
If this is true, you can go ahead and make a hypothesis about what you think will
happen to the water at the top of the glass.
To perform the experiment, fill your glass of water to the very top. Then, slowly
(and carefully) add your items to the glass. How many items can you fit in the
glass before it starts to overflow? Was this what you predicted? What did the
top of the jar look like when viewed from the side? Was that what you thought
would happen?
Remember to record all your data on the worksheet. When you’ve completed
the experiment, share your findings with your friends and family. Of course, you
can (and should) always repeat your experiment to make sure you get the same
results. You could also try modifying the experiment by using different items to
place in the water… and see if you get similar results!
To view a video of this experiment, go to the website:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1ErpX5kvFA
Surface Tension 2
Hypothesis:
I think this is what
will happen when I add
items to the glass of
water:
Results:
Here is what actually
happened when I
added items to the
glass of water:
I placed _____ items in the glass before it overflowed!
Here is what it looked
like from the side just
before the glass
overflowed: