Looking Back: What Happened?
For this lab I worked with Savreen and we made bouncy balls, I've never trued to make a bouncy ball and I didn't think we would be able to make one with household materials, but I was excited to test it out. Once we started making the ball we weren't sure it would work, we were almost positive it wasn't going to work, and we were sort of proved wrong. It was very difficult to get the right shape of the ball but when we finally got it somewhat circular we were very excited. The bouncy balls themselves didn't work too well, they didn't really bounce which was a little disappointing. Looking Beyond: What's the science? There is a chemical reaction taking place, and it’s between the borax and the glue. The borax acts like a “cross-linker” with the glue because of the polymer molecules, this means that when you lift the bouncy ball it will all stay together. Glue is made up of polymer which is a long chain of molecules, so when you add borax to the glue the polymers stick together like a net. The cornstarch makes it so all of the ingredients stick together so the ball will keep its shape. Looking Inward: Did you get desirable results? I think the results we got were okay, the ball didn't want to hold its shape so we had to keep on adding glue to the places that weren't sticking. Once we had finished molding it and our bouncy balls were in the shape we wanted, we let them dry for a little bit before picking them up and bouncing them. We soon discovered that they didn't bounce very high, and after every bounce the ball started to break apart. I think the reason why our bouncy ball didn't work very well is because we didn't mix all of the ingredients together very well, the cornstarch borax mixture didn't want to mix with the glue, so we tried our hardest but we didn't get the results we needed. I think I performed well in this activity, I did everything I could to make a good bouncy ball, and they weren't half bad so I think that's a success. Looking Outward: Collaboration and Impact I worked with Savreen on this lab, and I think we worked really well together, so far I've worked with her on every lab so I'm very familiar of her work habits. I think that we both get work done and are very hard working which is why we always work together. I contributed to this lab by working on the proposal alongside Savreen and when we didn't have one of the materials available to us I went all around the school to find it. Looking Forward: What's Next? If I were to do this lab again I would really mix everything together very well to make sure the bouncy ball stays together. I would also make sure I know where all of the materials are the day before so I'm not frantically running around looking for things. I will definitely be working with Savreen again in the future, because we work really well together and I know I can depend on her to actually work and get things done. I also want to do more labs with Genevie and Morgan because I also really enjoy working with them. I don't think there's anyway to continue this experiment unless I were to try it again to see if I can get better results, which I don't see myself doing Takeaway: Summary After the proposal was typed up and we gathered all of our materials, we went outside to start this messy process. There were two separate containers one of them had warm water, cornstarch, and borax, that mixture was then mixed until thoroughly combined, in another container there was glue and food coloring. Then we poured the glue into the bowl with all of our other ingredients, after that we tried to mix everything together. There was a big glob in the bowl now so we took that out and cut that in half and we each made one ball, rolling it in the palms of our hands. After rolling the glob for a very long time we eventually started to see the shape of a ball, at this point the ball was falling apart so we added glue into the cracks. The glue helped it stick together and once we both liked the shape we had we let the ball dry a bit, then we started bouncing!
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December 2015
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