Crystal Science Exploration: Follow-up

A week after we first made our sugar crystals (see our other post), we observed that there were still not many crystals forming on the sticks, but there were lots of crystals on the top of the solution.

This was different to what we were expecting to see, because the instructions said that we should be able to see crystals after a week. We talked about what might have gone wrong, and we came up with some ideas:

·      Maybe we had put too much food colouring into the solution

·      Maybe they just need to be left for longer for the crystals to form.

·      Maybe the crust on the top was stopping the crystals forming on the sticks.

·      Jenny had seen some instructions that said the crystals would form better if we dipped the iceblock sticks into ordinary sugar first, so that the crystals have somewhere to form, so maybe we should have done this first.

We thought that we could try out dipping the sticks into sugar, to see if it makes a difference. We decided to leave some sticks the same and give them more time to form, and we dipped some others in sugar (we marked these pots with a sticker so that we knew which ones we had changed).

We left them for 2 weeks to see if crystals form on the dipped ones more quickly, or if the ones we left the same will form crystals if we leave them for longer.