Zoe's Magic Shell inquiry

This month Zoe needed to whip out a quick Inquiry project for school. (That's a joke - inquiry projects are never quick.) She decided that she was interested in how Magic Shell separates, so we put some in a test tube and waited to see how long it would take. The first test tube is regular store-bought Magic Shell, the second tube is some homemade Magic Shell (very easy to make by the way), and the third tube is some store-bought Magic Shell that we'd had in the cupboard for awhile that had crushed pretzels in it (and was impossible to pour basically from day 1.)

In the first picture here we had waited more than a day, and the only Magic Shell that had separated at all was the one on the left, and only 2mm. Zoe had been taking pictures every 10 minutes for hours... hoping that something would happen, but even after waiting overnight we felt like these results were just not enough.


We had to be writing up her results almost immediately, so we did a little bit of panicking and decided to see how else we could get Magic Shell to separate. Here is a homemade centrifuge that we'd had high hopes for.


Matt hooked up a contraption with a drill to help her spin it really fast. But - not fast enough - it just mixed the Magic Shell and didn't separate it at all.


Next we tried heat. The blow dryer was not enough to do much, plus it was going to take a million years to do anything, so we put it in the oven at 200 degrees.




And it worked! Hooray! Store-bought Magic shell easily separated after hours in the oven, and the homemade sort expanded and separated in a different way and also overflowed so we couldn't measure it. But - enough success to write up. Whew.


Meanwhile, Mattie attended her Winter Ball dance for school. She went with a group of friends and had a great time. Doesn't she look pretty?