The coke explosion

To work on our observation and skills and practice a new one - writing a hypothesis - we did the famous diet coke and mentos experiment. We tried it four ways:

1. Diet coke and whole mint mentos - about 3.5 feet of spray
2. Diet coke and crushed mint mentos - about 4.2 feet of spray
3. Diet coke and whole cherry mentos - about 4.2 feet of spray
4. Regular coke and whole mint mentos - about 5 feet of spray

My online research told me that crushed mentos would yield a smaller fountain than whole mentos, but we observed the opposite. Also, regular coke was supposed to be less explosive than diet - again, we got the opposite results!

I asked everyone to write a theory about how to get the biggest fountain, based on our results today, and we're going to try the theories out next week.

I think they were all sort of upset that all the soda and candy got wasted like that, because afterwards they were all asking me if they could taste what was left over, and I said "sure." Before I knew it, there was nothing left. They'd chugged all the flat soda and grabbed out all the candy in their mouths.