Soap Explosion

Explosion is really a much too generous word for this experiment. Said "explosion" is really just "a bit of a puff up;" let it be known that nothing actually explodes. It is decently neat though. It's like watching those black "snakes" (fireworks) that we sometimes set off on the Fourth of July. Only it's soap instead of black, dirty, dusty coal junk. So, yeah.

I found this idea on a plethora of sites on the net, so I'm not going to credit any one place or another. It seems that lots of people have done this, but it was a first for us. The main idea of this science experiment is to put ivory soap in the microwave and watch what happens. We followed the advice of a friend who warned us not to put in more than 1/4 of the soap bar at a time. But after doing it, I would say that the allowable amount probably totally depends on your microwave. I think we could have probably done the whole bar and it would have been just fine. But hey, better safe than sorry. I'd at least start with the 1/4 bar.

Another friend told us to let the microwave go for anywhere between 1 and 2 minutes to get the soap to "explode." It took our soap almost exactly 1 minute. We gathered around our microwave, eyes on the soap inside, and waited while the time counted down. Eventually the soap started expanding and growing. It took it just a couple of seconds (think 10-15) from the start of it's growth to when it was done. So make sure you watch it the whole time. This is what it looks like when it's done, approximately:

Don't try to handle it too much at first. We learned this the hard way. Even though the outside cools off relatively quickly, the inside is still very very scorching. While we waited for the first piece to cool down, we put another 1/4 bar in the microwave and watched again. It was pretty funny to see it get all puffy. The kids were interested in the first two go-rounds. But after that, they were kinda done.

So it was on to some hands-on stuff. We put our soap explosions into bowls and played around with it a bunch. Mostly all they wanted to do was pull it apart and make it into "sand" in the bottom of the bowl.

But the more they played with it, the more they complained of the soap starting to make their skin feel itchy. Therefore, the activity didn't last too much after this.

I tried to get them excited about reconstituting the soap, or at least an attempt, but their interest had completely waned. Nevertheless, later in the day I spent some time adding some water and swirling it around until finally dumping the whole sudsy mixture down the drain. 

Anyway, it's pretty fun. It gets about a 7 out of 10 for us. It's not horribly interesting or horribly cool, but it is pretty interesting and pretty cool and really unique. And there you have it.