Tasty Science

This looks WONDERFUL in the box! It claims to contain 10 sweet and educational scientific activities.

In theory, sounds GREAT!

We started working with it today. Each of the five kids picked a project.

Here's what we found:

1. The litmus paper does not work.

2. The pamphlet inside does not explain any science. It does not explain interactions. This is all stuff you will need to know or look up if you're going to actually teach using this product. It's pretty basic stuff, but still...brush up on your knowledge if it's rusty!

3. The recipe for the cupcakes makes horrible cupcakes. They're more like lumps. Being a baker, all I did was look at the recipe and know something was seriously wrong. The experiment worked, but it definitely doesn't turn out anything that even remotely resembles soft, tasty cupcakes. They were more like lumps of dough. You'd be much better off just doing this on your own with your own ingredients. All you have to do is leave the leavening out of half the batter and let the kid see the difference in the cupcakes that have and the ones that have not. Unlike the photo on the box leads you to believe, there is no frosting for the cupcakes. However, there are sprinkles, but they all fall off because the "cupcakes" are hard, heavy, doughy lumps.

4. The fizzy drinks were fun to make, but nobody could drink them because they tasted so horrible. Even the kid who will eat or drink anything couldn't manage to down it. In addition, their measurments are off and leads to the drink bubbling and spilling out of the test tubes.

5. The melt in your mouth candy: this worked. This did not surprise me, since all she had to do was get a teaspoon of sugar and mix a scoop of powdered flavoring into it. We have no idea what the lesson was, except perhaps that when you put flavoring in sugar, you get flavored sugar. We kinda knew that already.

6. It calls for ingredients not included. For example, the recipe for rock candy calls for four cups of sugar. We haven't tried that one yet, but my oldest plans on it soon. It looks like a typical one, so I have high hopes that it will work out well for her.

In a little while, we're going to be trying the blue sugar cookie experiment. Like the cupcake recipe, I can tell from the ingredients that this recipe wasn't exactly invented for taste. It calls for blue food coloring, 1/4 cup butter or margarine, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup flour. All you do is color 1/2 of the batter, the rest you leave plain, bake, and have volunteers taste them and choose whether they like the blue or plain ones better.

If it's fun you're after, you'll have a blast laughing at the finished products and the faces of people as they taste what are, in my opinion, some really nasty "sweet treats."
If it's a great opportunity to teach science, this wouldn't be the right choice.
If you'd like to teach marketing skills, it's a wonderful opportunity to show how you can make money offering people most anything if you package it properly.

Nothing it says on the box is false. It DOES contain activities. The activities ARE sweet to a point, even if you'd rather drink cod liver oil. I saw nothing on the box that let me know that I'd need to provide a lot of the ingredients. The fact that scientific questions are on the box led me to believe there would be written information inside to assist in the teaching. Nope.

The box also claims "Great for birthday parties!" I guess that is completely accurate...if you hate children and enjoy seeing their little faces crumple in disappointment.

If you decide to try it anyhow, let me know how that worked for ya!