We saw this video today and could not believe what it was showing. So, having learned that all good scientists “question, discuss and check each other’s explanations”, we decided to try it out for ourselves. This has been a big theme this year; working as real scientists. it also really reinforced the idea that not everything on the internet should be believed! Many students think that everything on the web is real without checking the facts. So that is what we did at the end of the day today. We got some parent helpers to come and lend us their phones and tried it out. First though, the students wrote out the whole experiment including their hypothesis before doing the experiment as a written record of what we had done. Here is the video that we saw in preparation for the experiment.

Needless to say, when we tried it in the classroom, the experiment did not work. One of my students made the bright observation that we never see under the table and he thought that they could have a heating element underneath warming the table and heating the popcorn. Anyway, it was at the very least, a lot of fun and the students really got the message. However, I think they were disappointed that the popcorn did not pop!!!