Fun Science Projects

Parents are always told that making things fun is the key to getting children to learn. It seems a simple concept, but must have some truth to it, as many studies have proved that adding an element of excitement, a game even an amusing cartoon character or animated aviator can improve the learning capability of kids by up to 40%.

Science is a great place to start when it comes to making education fun. Fun science projects are easier to prepare than other more academic subjects. On this website we are going to look at some of the best experiments that children can pick for a project. All of these are interesting, informative and above all fun!

The Diet Coke explosion

This first experiment is an absolute winner with kids from every grade. Mentos mixed with the diet coke will cause the coke to shoot out of the bottle up to 9 metres into the air. For this experiment you will need a large bottle of diet coke, half a pack of Mentos and if you would like to make things slightly easier, a Geyser tube.

After finding somewhere that won’t get damaged when coke goes everywhere, stand the bottle upright and unscrew the lid. Then get a funnel and place it into the top of the bottle. You can now slowly poor half the packet of mentos into the funnel. Once you’ve tipped half the mentos in, run away as the resulting geyser can be up to 29 feet high!

This experiment is very popular with boys, try to get your students to try different numbers of Mentos varying sizes of coke bottles and even coke bottles of various ages. The age of a bottle of coke can limit its fizzyness and therefore alter the reaction.

Taste without smell

This is one of those fun science projects that no one believes is going to work. Simply cut an apple and a potato into the two similar sized peices. Then get your students to close their eyes, and move the two peices around so they don’t know which is which. Now, if you hold your nose whilst the two peices of food you will struggle to tell the difference.

This is due to the fact that your nose and mouth are connected through the same airway which means that you taste and smell foods at the same time. Your sense of taste can recognize salty bitter and sour but when you combine this with your sense of smell you can recognize other individual tastes of food. Take away your smell (and sight) and you limit your brains ability to tell the difference between certain foods.

This can be a very strange experience, promoting interesting questions and suggestions from students. By varying foods with a similar texture you can get all sorts of interesting results and secondary experiments.

Invisible Ink with a lemon

Perfect if your class is learning about famous spies, and detectives. This fun science experiment uses lemon juice to write secret messages. You will need half a lemon (for each experiment) a bowl and spoon, a cotton bud, sheet of white paper and a lamp or other light bulb.

First of all your class has to make the invisible ink, you can do this by squeezing about a quarter of the half of lemon juice into a bowl and adding a few drops of water. Make sure you then mix it together well with the spoon. Then, take your cotton bud and write on the white paper a secret message.

You will have to wait about 20 minutes for the lemon juice to dry thoroughly. Once dry the ink will be completely invisible. The message can only be read by heating up the lemon juice on the lamp.

Lemon juice is an organic substance that when heated turns brown due to oxidization. Once your class has got the idea with the lemon juice try to experiment with other substances such as honey, milk, onion juice, vinegar and wine. All have a similar reaction but some are more interesting than others.