[sorry for mistakes – this one was written up in a big hurry]
I’m a big fan of the Mathematical Objects Podcast hosted by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett. Their most recent episode talked about Newton’s law of cooling and I thought it would be fun to try the project at home. Here’s link to the specific podcast:
Note that this project does require some adult supervision because it involves boiling water.
The idea in this project is to explore Newton’s law of cooling two different ways. The first way is to talk about the law, observe some water cooling for a bit, and then make a prediction about how that cooling will proceed. The second way is to take two cups of hot water and compare the temperature when you add cold milk to one initially and to the other 10 min later.
Here’s how we got started:
Next we took two glasses of hot water and measured the initial temperature:
5 min later we returned to measure the new temperatures and then use Newton’s law of cooling to predict the temps 5 min later. This part of the project was a little hard to do on camera, but you’ll get the idea of the things you have to keep track of. Hopefully we did all of the calculations right!
Next we moved on to the “tea” experiment. Here we started with two cups of hot water and added milk to one of them. We are going to wait 10 min and then add milk to the other glass and compare the temperatures of the two cups. Both kids mad a prediction about what would happen:
Finally, we returned to the cups and finished the 2nd experiment. Both kids guessed right on the relative temperatures, but I’m not 100% sure that we got the amount of water and milk exactly equal in the two cups. Still a fun experiment, though.
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