Weird Science: Investigation Rotation!

This week we have started our new focus for learning, entitled Weird Science.  We are looking at the different aspects of Science and Technology and today, following our hook in on Tuesday, we began our first investigations.  Here is the experiment completed by Homeroom 18 as part of investigating the Material World.

We were looking at:

• How much sugar is in the food we eat?
• How does the sugar content change when our stomach digests it.

We conducted an experiment using four different foods in two different states.

We used: cheese, chippies, pasta & white chocolate.  One state was having the food mushed up - like it had been chewed.  The other state was having the food digested, where acids had been added to digest the food to a liquid form... we were lucky enough to have this prepared for us by Massey University Institute of Food & Nutrition.

We put 1ml of each (8 test tubes altogether) in test tubes using a pipette and then added benedict solution and placed in a water bath for 2 minutes.  The benedict solution makes foods with sugar in them go from blue (the colour of the benedict solution) to green, yellow, orange and then red to show more and more sugar.

The results were:

State 1 - undigested slurries: Cheese had no sugar (it was blue), chippies some, pasta more and white chocolate the most (it was orange).  

State 2 - digested foods: Cheese still had no sugar (it was blue), chippies and pasta had the same (but the bottom of the chippies one was orange so it had more), and the white chocolate should have been dark red, but there was a malfunction and it hadn't changed as it should have so we are going to retest it.

Here's the photos showing before and after the water bath...

Thanks to Breana for taking and sharing the photos with us!