Science Fair

The Science Fair for my son's elementary was held this evening. All fifth graders were required to participate, and the rest of the student body had the choice to be involved. 

I know I am biased, but I truly feel my son did a fantastic job with his board and presented himself well when it was his turn to be judged. There was no competition among the students, but each student received a certificate, green ribbon, and $5 gift certificate to the next school wide book fair. And, to end the evening - raffles were drawn from all participants. My son, with his continued good luck (he always wins a raffle - seriously, Always!), won a box of Legos. 

Well, let me remind us in years to come that he really was handed a Zombie Lab Kit. And being the parent's that we are when he returned with this dreadful looking box about Zombie's that my husband decided to exchange the prize. Really? When should we be promoting Zombie's to elementary kids? Not thrilled with the PTSA choice on that one.

Back to the Science Fair ... 

My son's experiment was testing the taste, texture, and quality of an Oatmeal Cookie recipe when using a different variable of Salt. He made four different batches of cookies during our mid-winter break; one batch per different salt, while all the other ingredients and cook time remained constant. 

The salts he used were Sea Salt, Kosher Salt, Table Salt, and Mediterranean Salt. He weighed them on our kitchen scale, cut them in half to test the quality of the cook time for each, and created a survey for his Taste Testers (14 in all) to rate each cookie. 

Surprisingly the Table Salt had the most salty taste compared to the other salts used, and only one person liked this cookie the best (me). The most favored cookie was the one that used Sea Salt. It had the mildest flavor of salt. All taste testers (excluding our immediate family) did not know what they were rating the cookie on - they simply had to rate their favorite to least favorite. All cookies were labeled with a letter, rather than the name of the salt in each cookie. 

A fun fact that my son learned from Food Network research is that finer salts have a higher volume of salt due to the finer grain, compared to the course salt when using the same measurement. So when cooking with coarse salts (Sea Salt) one must use more salt than when using finer grain (Table Salt). That seemed to hold true in his experiment because the same ratio of salt was used in all the cookies; and the Sea Salt had the mildest flavor, the Table Salt had the strongest.

The best part of his board were the pictures that he took of each salt under his home microscope. One day my husband and I were in the den chatting when my son came in with the iPad. He showed us his pictures of the salts he had been looking at under the microscope in his bedroom. Somehow he had found a way to use the camera of the iPad to place over the eyepiece of the microscope, snap a picture, label the picture, and forward each to my husband's email account to be printed for his board. Smart kid!

I'm proud of my son for working so hard on his Science Experiment! He truly handled himself with great responsibility and worked independently gathering his information and organizing his writing. He works much different than my daughter did at the same age - it is fun to see their differences and yet know they both come out with the same result of excellent grades, and knowledge that sticks (which is the most important).