Young scientists – The Mentos fountain challenge

This is Science and Engineering week – a celebration of science and engineering.

When we visited the Big Bang Fair at the NEC we watched the Kaboom! Show and on the way out we were given a leaflet about the Mentos Fountain Challenge. This looked like an ideal experiment to try with my children.

The basic idea is to put Mentos in a bottle of diet coke and watch the fountain that spurts out of the top of the bottle. By changing some different things (like temperature of the cola and chopping up the Mentos) then the size of the fountain can change. Here’s a video of what we did:

As you can see it was very messy and we had loads of fun. The original plan was that it was just going to be the children that did the experiment, but during the first attempts they were not able to get the mentos into the bottle fast enough. So I helped with the remaining ones.

Our fountains weren’t that impressive compared to some others, but we had lots of fun and learned that we should only change one variable at a time so that we know what causes the change in the fountain.