Good morning! Today we are introducing a new category to Ali Does It: MAD SCIENCE.
Cait and I did a lot of science together in high school, and we quite enjoyed ourselves. So we decided, while I was home in Ottawa for a WHOLE MONTH, to do some more science to keep ourselves occupied and out of the Pie’s hair.
For our first attempt at science, we decided to create polymer bouncy balls. Seemed simple enough. We got all the necessary supplies at the dollar store, including these sparkly plastic Christmas balls that held chocolate. We threw out the chocolate but kept the spheres to serve as moulds.
So what you need to do this is borax; corn starch; white, clear, or blue school glue; warm water; measuring spoons; two small plastic containers for mixing, as well as a stick or spoon for stirring; and optional glitter or food colouring.
Pour 2 tablespoons warm water and 1/2 teaspoon borax into one of the containers and stir or shake it to dissolve the borax. If you want to add food colouring, now’s your chance.
In the other container, pour 1 tablespoon glue.
Add in 1 tablespoon of corn starch and 1 tablespoon of the borax solution that you just made. DO NOT STIR. Let this all mellow and mix together on its own for 15 seconds. I think maybe our container was too big because there wasn’t really any interaction going on.
After fifteen seconds, whip out your spoon and start stirring. Stir until the mixture becomes too stiff to pull the spoon through.
Then empty the contents of your container into your hands and start kneading. It will begin as super messy.
But then it will start to come together.
And eventually form a ball.
However, we couldn’t really get our ball to fully solidify, and it never bounced, so we thought we’d try again.
This time we used clear glitter glue.
This stuff ended up forming an odd sort of non-Newtonian fluid and never solidified at all. Not to mention it didn’t turn out translucent as promised. I blame the weird dollar store glue.
And of course the amounts we used were way too small to fit in our clever little moulds.
Never mind. We’ll try again some time.
