The Science Fair

Christian's school did a Science Fair last week and 1st-6th graders were able to participate. He decided that he would like to do a project, so we started thinking of ideas. I had been curious for a long time about how to keep sliced apples from going brown, so I suggested it to him. My boys both love to eat apples, so Christian was fully on board with the idea. We looked up some different "at home" methods to keep the brown away on the Internet, and then set up our experiment. He tried three different varieties of apples in four different treatments.

He used Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, and Granny Smith apples. The four treatments he tried were: Lemon Juice, Salt Water, Lemon Lime Soda and Fruit Fresh (a vitamin C mixture sold in the grocery store to keep produce fresh)

We dipped one apple slice of each variety in each treatment and then let them sit out on the counter for 2 hours. Every 5 minutes we ranked the apples based on how brown they were. Here is Christian getting ready to start the experiment...

The results of the experiment were pretty convincing. First, Granny Smith apples lasted much long than the other varieties. Red Delicious were the worst and went brown extremely fast. The best treatment was Lemon Juice by a fairly large margin. The apple slices (all varieties) that were dipped in lemon juice lasted all night on the counter without turning brown. I was pretty amazed. Fruit Fresh also worked fairly well, but lemon juice is less expensive and worked better.

Then we made a display board showing the questions we asked, the hypothesis, the data, and the results. Christian's favorite part of the whole project was helping me glue the papers and pictures to the board. Then I helped him prepare a little presentation to give to the judges. He was a little nervous, but seemed ready to go.

I dropped him off at school and hoped that everything would go okay. Not only did it go okay, but Christian won First Place in his age group. He got a fancy blue ribbon and his name announced over the intercom at school. He was pretty proud of it. I am just glad that he had a good experience, regardless of the outcome. We sure are proud of our little scientist!