Day: October 4, 2015

Do “Double Stuffed Oreos” have double the stuffing?

Several years ago I saw some teachers talking about a project with double stuffed Oreo cookies. Sadly, I don’t remember who it was, but just to be clear from the start – this project was not my idea.

The neat idea behind this project is pretty simple – do double stuffed Oreos really have double the stuffing of regular Oreos? It is a great little experiment for kids!

As another aside, I’d intended to do this project with a group of kids on our summer vacation (I think we had 10 kids in the house with us), but I couldn’t find our kitchen scale. We moved this year and the scale ended up in some mystery location. As we were unpacking some winter clothes today, the scale finally turned up in some random closet. Yes!!

So, I started the project by asking the kids what we should do to investigate whether or not “double stuffed” was an accurate description. Working together, they developed a pretty good plan:

Next we started in on the plan. We encountered a little experimental error (by luck!) and ended up deciding to weigh 10 of the shells to get a better idea about the weight of just 1. I was really happy with the discussion we had during this part of the project:

Now that we had an estimate of the weight of the shells, we tried to estimate the weight of the filling. We followed the procedure from the last video and weighed 5 of the cookies and subtracted the weight of 10 shells.

Also, I *love* that my younger son noticed that we are assuming the weight of the double stuffed shells was the same as the weight of the shells of the single stuffed cookies.

For the double stuffed cookies, we first checked the weight of the shells. We encountered an unexpected problem – the frosting was sticking to the double stuffed shells more than it stuck to the single stuffed shells. We tried to solve that problem with a knife, but we did expect the double stuffed shells to end up weighing a bit more because of this problem.

From the measurements in the last video, we were fairly confident that the two sets of shells weighed the same. That meant the last step was finding the weight of the filling for the double stuffed Oreos, and, sure enough, it was nearly exactly double the weight of the filling of the single stuffed cookies. Yay! 🙂

So, a really fun, and fairly simple, data gathering project for kids. Happy that we found that “double stuffed” really was double stuffed!