Not your usual experiment, this is a book: “The League of Scientists” is a young adult fiction book by Andy Kaiser (the creator of Digital Bits Science Lab).

Equipment needed:

The League of Scientists is available here: http://www.LeagueOfScientists.com

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

The League of Scientists is a group of smart kids who love science. They use their knowledge and critical thinking skills to solve seemingly-supernatural mysteries.

One of the components of the book is the mystery aspect, and not just the “main” mystery. In most chapters, there is a puzzle. The solution to the puzzle involves the application of science or critical thinking. The book is intended to give science education (and scientific applications – something you don’t always get from such fiction) while still giving kids a good story and characters.

Equipment needed:

Two measuring cups (one cup must be able to hold at least two cups)

Water

Sugar

One spoon

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Make sure that your cup of water and your cup of sugar are filled up precisely.

What do you think will happen when you pour the cup of sugar into the cup of water? You might think that you’ll get a result of two cups of a water/sugar mixture. Let’s try it: Pour the sugar into the water. Stir with the spoon.

Note what happened: one cup of sugar added to one cup of water does not give us two cups!

What’s happened? Why does one plus one not make two? We’ve created a “solution”, and this has interesting properties. A solution is when you mix ingredients, and those ingredients may undergo a physical change as part of that mixing. In this case, our sugar changes physically. Much of it dissolves in water. This is happening on a molecular level – the sugar seems to take up less room, because it’s using the extra space between the water molecules! The density of the water is greater now – we have more molecules crammed into the same space.

On a big scale, this is how the Earth’s oceans are salty, even though we can’t see that salt. Water looks like it may take up a lot of space, but there’s plenty of room to share.

Equipment needed:

A glass. It should have straight sides, not angled.

Water

A bunch of ice

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

This experiment shows us how water and ice and volume and density have an interesting relationship.

Get a glass and put several ice cubes in it. (The glass should have straight sides – angled sides will get interfere with the ice and affect the experiment.)

Fill the glass up with water, almost to the top. Add a few more ice cubes. And one or two on top of those. You’re trying to get a pile of cubes suspended in the water, above the rim of the glass. The water should be as full as you can get it without spilling over the rim of the glass:

What do you think will happen when the ice melts? The quick answer for some might be that the ice will melt, and that extra water will spill over the rim of the glass, overflowing the glass capacity.

It won’t.

Ice takes up more space than unfrozen, liquid water. The ice in the water displaces the water inside the glass. As the ice melts, that water and the surrounding water move to take up the newly-available space.

The perceived volume of water looks different when a bunch of the water is frozen. Knowing these differences between water and ice can help you better understand how much you’re drinking next time you drink ice water!

When heated, air will expand. When cooled, air will compress. Hot air takes up more space than cold air, as this experiment demonstrates.

Equipment needed:

A balloon

A plastic soda bottle (a 2-liter will work well)

Duct tape

A soup pot

A stove

Water

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Pour some water into the bottle. Three inches or so will be plenty.

Pull the ballon over the mouth of the bottle. The balloon should be deflated at this point. Wrap a strip of duct tape around the balloon-bottle connection, to make sure the seal is close to airtight.

Fill the soup pot with water. An inch or so will be plenty.

Put the bottle in the soup pot. Put the pot on the stove.

Turn on the stove. You should have something that looks like this:

Wait for the water in the pot to heat up. As it does, the water in the bottle will heat, too. The balloon will eventually inflate:

What’s happening? This science experiment demonstrates how air, when heated, will expand. It expands because air molecules move around a lot more when warmed up. Since they’re moving around more, they bounce around and off each other, and take up more room. We see this as the balloon expands.

To see the opposite of this effect, take the bottle-balloon invention off of the stove. Place it in a container full of ice, or stand it up in a freezer. The balloon will shrink back down and deflate, and the bottle itself might compress inward as the air gets colder!

Another question that people may have is, “why doesn’t the plastic bottle melt on the stove?” Here’s an experiment that shows why the bottle won’t melt, because the water conducts the heat away from the bottle.

See surface tension in action – what happens when you turn it on, and what happens when you turn it off!

Equipment needed:

A wide bowl filled with water

Several index cards

Scissors

Liquid dishwashing soap

An eye dropper, or medicine dropper

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Cut an index card into confetti: cut it into strips, then cut those strips into squares. The squares should be no larger than a half-inch on a side.

Mix up the confetti. Make sure none of the pieces are sticking to each other.

Suck a couple drops of liquid soap into the eye dropper.

Sprinkle the confetti in the bowl of water:

Then, use the eye dropper to squeeze one drop of liquid soap directly into the middle of the bowl. Once the soap hits the water, the pieces of paper will fly towards the side of the bowl:

What’s happening? When we drop the soap into the water, it breaks the water’s surface tension right where the soap landed. Think of the surface of the water as a balloon, stretched tight. When the surface tension breaks, the balloon “pops”, and pulls itself away from the break, taking the confetti with it.

If you want to do this experiment again, you’ll need to make sure that any soap is completely washed off any bowl you use. So either use a different bowl, or be sure to wash all the soap off the original one.

A “zoomer” is a small boat-shaped piece of paper that zooms around the surface of water using surface tension.

Equipment needed:

A wide body of water. At the smallest, you should use something like a bathtub. Bigger examples would be a puddle or a swimming pool. The water must be calm, however. If there are waves or splashes, the experiment won’t work.

Several index cards

Scissors

Liquid dishwashing soap

An eye dropper, or medicine dropper

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Cut out an index card in a shape like this:

Notice the hole cut near the bottom – be sure to cut out that part, too. This hole is where we’ll drop the liquid soap.

Fill your eye dropper with some of your liquid soap.

Next, carefully drop the zoomer into your water.

Finally, quickly squeeze a couple drops of liquid soap into the hole in the bottom of the zoomer. And the zoomer will zoom! It will move quickly around, and will also stop fairly quickly, depending on the size of your water container.

What’s happening? The zoomer is taking advantage of surface tension – the “skin” that forms on top of the water, allowing small things (like bugs, leaves, and your zoomer) to float on top.

Dishwashing liquid – and every other soap – will break water’s surface tension. The breaking of the surface tension pushes the zoomer forward. The zoomer will continue to move until it runs into water where the surface tension is already broken, or until it runs out of soap!

Learn about buoyancy. This lab answers the question: Why is it easier to swim in the ocean than in a lake?

Equipment needed:

An egg (it can be either raw or hard-boiled. It needs to be fresh.)

A tall, wide glass

Water

A long-handled spoon for stirring in the glass

Salt (you’ll need a lot of salt, more than what’s contained in a salt shaker. If you’re purchasing for a group or class, shop for salt in bulk.)

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Carefully place your egg in the empty glass. Then fill the glass with water, leaving an inch or so of space at the top. You’ll see that the egg sinks, and rests happily at the bottom of the glass. (If your egg floats in the fresh water, that’s an indicator of an old egg. Use a fresh egg instead.)

Now that we’ve seen the egg sink, use the spoon to carefully lift the egg out of the glass.

Next, pour salt into the water.

Keep pouring.

And pour a little more.

Stir it.

The goal is to get so much salt in the water, that you can’t dissolve any more. Stir the mixture for a while. If you lift the spoon out after stirring, and still see a few salt grains clinging to it, your salt-water mixture is ready.

Using the spoon, carefully lower the egg into the water. If you’ve mixed enough salt in the water, the egg will now float!

The egg floats in the salt water because it has more buoyancy in salt water than in fresh water. Buoyancy is determined by the density of the water. Fresh water is not very dense. Things will sink easier in fresh water. Salt water consists of water mixed with a LOT of salt. That salt adds density to the water. So when you put the egg in salt water, the heavier density of the water causes the egg to float.

This is why it’s easier to swim in the ocean than in a lake: the ocean is salt water, a freshwater lake is not. Your body is more buoyant in the higher-density salt water, and you can more easily float.

Your veins and arteries carry blood and nutrients around your body. Demonstrate “you are what you eat” with a little help from celery.

Equipment Needed:

Glasses

Celery

Water

Liquid food coloring

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Pick a couple of colors of food coloring (hint: green may not work as well, as it’s too close to the color of the celery). Put three drops of the food coloring into your glasses, and fill the glasses halfway with water.

Cut your celery so that, when placed in the glass, you have half of the celery in water, and the other half out of water:

Let the celery sit in the glasses overnight.

The next day, look at your celery. In the picture below, you’ll see two celery sticks cut in half. One stick was soaking in blue water, the other in red. The parts labeled “bottom” were the parts submerged in water overnight. The parts labeled “top” were sticking out above the water overnight.

Notice the food coloring leaking out of the “top” pieces.

What’s happening here? When placed in the water, the celery uses it like it always does – it draws the water up into its “vascular bundle“, the thin lines that are the transport system of a celery stalk. Similar to the way blood flows in our own veins and arteries (as pumped around by our heart), the celery’s vascular bundle uses a process called “transpiration” to move its liquid nutrients.

Our bodies need nutrients and liquids to live, just like a stick of celery. Now, we don’t just sit down in a glass of water; we drink it! But the concept is similar – what we take into our bodies spreads to most every other part of our body. We are what we eat (and drink).

If you’ve ever wanted to make your own rainbow, it’s not difficult with a little experimentation.

Equipment Needed:

A flashlight

A large, wide glass (it should be as wide or wider than the head of your flashlight)

Water

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

In this experiment, we refract light from our flashlight through water. The light, when refracted in the right way, will separate the light into its component colors. The name “Roy G. Biv” is an easy to remember name. It’s also an acronym: ROYGBIV are the first letters of all the colors in a rainbow. The colors in a rainbow are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

A rainbow is also an example of additive color mixing. Additive color mixing occurs when you mix together different colors of light. The light coming from the flashlight is our combination of all colors – it appears white. After shining it through our water, the water separates the white light into the colors that make it up.

To make a rainbow, I used a coffee pot filled with water. Then I placed it on the floor, and shone a flashlight through it, with the refracted light landing on a nearby wall:

Next, you’ll have to play with the flashlight and the water. Move them around. Angle them differently. Move them closer to or away from the wall. The light pattern on the wall will change, and eventually, if you work it right, you’ll see a rainbow at the edges of the light pattern. While the setup you see pictured above worked pretty well, the rainbow picture below was taken by shining the flashlight from underneath the coffee pot, shining the light pattern on the ceiling:

Here’s a close-up of the rainbow picture. Look close, and say hello to Mr. Roy G. Biv!

Refraction happens when when light is bent as it moves. Instead of going in a straight line, it appears to turn, curve or bend.

Equipment Needed:

A flashlight

A glass (it should be as wide or wider than the head of your flashlight)

Water

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

To make light refract, you need to pass it through two different substances. In this example, the two substances are air and water. Fill up a glass of water. Place a flashlight flat on a table, so that the light is pointed straight through the center of the glass. Turn on the flashlight, turn out the lights, and you’ll see light passing straight through the glass, like this:

Next, simply roll the flashlight. Don’t actually turn it, just move the entire flashlight up and down in relation to the glass. Even though the light is still coming straight out of the flashlight, the light will be refracted (bent) as it moves through the water in the glass. The refractive qualities of the water (and the shape of the water within the glass) will bend the light as you see in the picture below:

Looking at this with better lighting, examine the red line in the picture below. That indicates the path the light takes as it’s refracted. Again, this is caused by the water refracting the light, and the position of the flashlight in relation to the glass:

You’ve probably seen this happen at a restaurant. You’re sipping your drink through a straw. You glance at your glass at just the right angle, and the straw looks “broken”. Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.

Equipment Needed:

A straw (a stick, a pencil, a chopstick, or any other straight object will work fine)

A tall glass

Water

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Fill the glass halfway with water. Put the straw in it. If you place the straw at just the right angle, and view the glass from just the right angle, the straw will appear “broken”:

What’s happening here?

This experiment demonstrates the concept of refraction. Refraction happens when light is bent – it doesn’t always travel in a straight line. The water in the glass bends light as you’re looking at it. So part of the straw looks like it’s in a different place.

This strange appearance of the straw is because of what is called the “refractive index”. The refractive index is the measurement of slowdown light (and other waveform energy) encounters when in a particular substance. The refractive index of water is different than the refractive index of air. Light behaves differently when in water versus air. To us, this simply looks like our straw is bent or broken.

It’s easy, fun, kinda messy, and colorful. Learn about subtractive color combinations. Learn what colors make other colors.

Equipment Needed:

Liquid food coloring

Small transparent glasses (plastic or thick glass juice glasses work well)

Water

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Put a couple drops of red food coloring in one glass, and fill it one-third full with water. Do the same with the blue coloring in another glass. Then pour the two colors together into an empty third glass – you’ve got purple water!

Some colors will be “stronger” than others. You may find that, for example, your purple needs three drops of red coloring and only one drop of blue.

Your food coloring set should come with at least three or four different colors. Experiment and find out what colors make other colors:

This is a good time to introduce the subtractive color wheel: there is a pattern to how the colors mix together, and there is a visual way to show it. A subtractive color mix is when you create a new color by mixing different colored liquids together. It looks like this:

See how the electrical conductivity of water changes depending on what is dissolved in it.

Equipment Needed:

A multimeter, either a digital multimeter or an analog multimeter.

Two or three identical containers for water, like drinking glasses or transparent jars

Distilled water. Grocery stores sell bottled distilled water, usually near their bottled drinking water. “Distilled” means it is high-purity water with nothing dissolved in it

Tap water

Baking soda

Sugar

Table salt

A measuring spoon

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

First, fill one container with distilled water, and set your multimeter to the “ohms” setting for measuring electrical resistance. Touch the multimeter probes together to check that the zero setting is correct. Then, stick the tips of your probes into the water so that the metal part is completely underwater, holding them an inch or so apart. The electrical resistance should be very high.

Next, put some baking soda in the water – about a teaspoon in an 8-ounce glass. Stir it up until the baking soda dissolves, and measure the electrical resistance again. The resistance should be much lower.

Now, fill a series of glasses, with the following

Tap water
Distilled water + 1 teaspoon sugar
Distilled water + 1 teaspoon salt

…and measure the electrical resistance of each. How are they different?

What is going on here?

You should notice that water by itself is not very conductive; that some things (baking soda and salt) make the solution a lot more conductive; while other things (like sugar) do not. What is happening is this: Really pure water is actually an insulator, and does not conduct electricity very well, so it has a high resistance. But, a lot of things that dissolve in water “dissociate”, that is, they break up into electrically charged parts (ions) that can move around. When the ions move, they conduct electricity. Substances that dissolve in water and form ions like this are referred to as “electrolytes”, because they make it possible for water to conduct electricity.

Not all things that dissolve in water are electrolytes, though – the sugar will not make the water very conductive, because sugar dissolves without breaking up into ions. If your sugar did increase the conductivity a bit, it was probably because it had small amounts of some impurities that were electrolytes.

The tap water should have been more conductive than the distilled water, but not as conductive as the water with salt or baking soda dissolved in it. This is because the water out of your tap is not pure, it has minerals like calcium carbonate dissolved in it. Depending on where you live, you could have “hard” water (which has a lot of dissolved minerals in it and is quite conductive), or “soft” water (which has very little dissolved minerals, and can be almost as non-conductive as distilled water).

You can check the conductivities of other liquids, too, like cooking oil, vinegar, or soda pop. Also, see how adding just a little bit of baking soda or salt to water changes the conductivity, compared to adding a large amount.

Description:

A simple demonstration of electrolysis – electrocuting water to convert it into hydrogen.

Equipment Needed:

A 9-volt battery

Wire (something low-gauge and flexible is preferred, like copper wire)

Scissors

Wire stripper (optional, if you’re handy with scissors)

Tape (durable tape is required, like duct tape or electrical tape)

A glass of water

Salt

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

This experiment is a simple demonstration of electrolysis. Electrolysis is the method of breaking apart compounds into their original elements by passing an electric current through them.

Put simply, this experiment shows that if you electrocute water, you’ll get hydrogen.

First, we need to make the electric device that will make the electrolysis happen: get the 9-volt battery, your wire, the scissors and tape. Start stripping the ends of the wire. You will need two strands of wire at least six inches in length. Use the wire stripper or the scissors to strip the rubber sheath from both ends of each wire with the scissors. This will expose the wire itself:

After you’ve stripped both ends from both wires, take one wire and securely tape one stripped metal end to one terminal of the 9-volt battery. Next, do the same with the second wire – tape it to the remaining battery terminal. The result will be our electrolysis device, all ready to go:

The rest is easy:

Get your glass of water. Put a tablespoon or two of salt into it. Stir the salt to dissolve it. The water will become a little cloudy.

Get the electrolysis device. Dip both ends of the wire into the salt water.

You will immediately see bubbles start to fizzle off of one wire. (If you don’t see bubbles, then check to make sure that your wires have a good connection to the battery, and that the battery still holds a charge.)

What’s happening here? These instructions are simple do-it-yourself electrolysis: when you electrocute water (which is made of hydrogen and oxygen), the electricity breaks apart water molecules. The bubbles you see are the hydrogen from the water being released. Salt water improves the electrolysis reaction - fresh water (like in the picture above, since cloudy salt water was difficult to photograph) will still give you bubbles of hydrogen, but it won’t be as impressive as with salt water.
 

A leaky bottle can teach how air pressure works, and how strong air pressure is – It can stop water from flowing!

Equipment needed:

One clear, plastic bottle with an airtight top (a two-liter pop bottle with a screw-on cap works great)

A large bowl (something big enough to hold all the water that may be in the plastic bottle)

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Punch very small holes (less than a quarter-inch diameter) in the bottom of the plastic bottle. Three holes works well.

Fill the bottle with water. The holes will start draining the water, so you may have to turn the water on full blast to fill, or use one hand to cover the holes.

When the bottle is full, screw the top on tight. If you lift the bottle up, there may be a few drips, but after a few seconds no water should flow out. (If water still glugs out of the bottle at this point, you’ve made the holes too big.)

Unscrew the cap.

The water will start pouring out the holes in the bottom.

If you screw the cap back on before the water drains, the water flow will stop.

What’s happening here? Many things, but one big one is air pressure. With the cap screwed on, the water stays in the bottle. This is because the water needs more air to take the space at the top of the bottle, to replace the space previously filled by the water. Gravity is pulling on the water, and the water tries to flow out, but needs the air to expand and take up more space to do so. The air pressure isn’t changed – the air won’t expand or contract from the very small pull of the water. The air pressure is stronger than the pull of gravity. So the water stays in place.

If the cap is screwed on, there is nothing to replace any space used by the water. So the water doesn’t move. Unscrewing the cap allows air to flow into the bottle, which allows the water to pour out from the bottom, and the air takes up more and more space at the top.

Surface tension is a special attribute of water. When water is exposed to air, it forms a thin “skin” that keeps the water together. This is how some bugs skim over a water’s surface: surface tension keeps them from sinking into the water.

This experiment demonstrates surface tension. In it, we can join together two separate streams of water.

Equipment needed:

A used 2-liter pop bottle or milk carton (or some similar plastic container you can cut holes into)

A sharp knife (for cutting small holes in the bottle)

Water

A sink

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Cut two vertical holes in the bottle. They should be about 1/8 of an inch apart. They should be no more than 1/4 of an inch tall.

Hold the bottle over a sink. Fill the bottle with water.

Water will start to pour out of the holes. If you’ve cut them right, the water should form two streams, and shoot straight out from the bottle. Adjust the cuts if needed to make sure this happens.

Join the water streams by “pinching” the streams together, right where they leave the bottle. Your pinch should push the streams together, mixing their water into one stream.

When you take your hand away, the streams will be joined.

Next try “wiping” the streams: with a flat hand, quickly wipe your palm down the bottle, over the streams. If you do it right, the single stream will separate into two streams again.

What’s happening here?

The streams of water start off separated, since the water is coming out of two different holes when you start the water flow. But when you “pinch” the streams together, you’re forcing the water streams to join together. And because of surface tension, the streams decide to stay joined even after you finish the pinch. When you “wipe” your hand down the streams, you’re breaking the surface tension and the streams once more become separated.

Oil and water don’t mix. Putting food coloring in oil, and letting it slowly settle into a glass of water will create “water fireworks”, little streamers of color cruising down through the water.

Equipment needed:

Liquid food coloring

Cooking oil

Tall glass

Short glass

Cold water

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Fill the TALL GLASS with cold water. Don’t fill it all the way – Leave at least an inch of space at the top.

Pour about an inch of cooking oil into the SHORT GLASS. Put two or three small drops of your favorite colors of food coloring into the cooking oil.

Stir the oil/coloring mix slightly, just enough to break up the globs of color a little bit.

Slowly pour the oil from the short glass into the tall glass.

The oil will rise to the top of the water, and you can watch the globs of food coloring slowly settle to the bottom of the oil. In a few seconds, the color will begin floating down from the top of the oil mixture. It will hit the oil/water separation, and coloring will stream down through the water, looking like little streamers of color:

This experiment shows how oil and water don’t mix. When you mix them together, they’ll separate. The food coloring “fireworks” help add some pizazz.

Because we don’t want the food coloring mixing with the water – we instead want to see our colors streaming trails through the liquid – we use cold water. See why cold water will slow down the mixing process.

Earth’s atmosphere insulates and heats the Earth. This experiment is a great visual of the Greenhouse Effect.

Equipment needed:

Two identical glasses, filled with cold water.

A sealable bag (like a Zip-Lock bag, or a bag you can twist-tie closed). It must be large enough to completely cover and seal over one of the glasses.

A thermometer

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Place on glass in the bag. Seal the bag.

Put both glasses (one in the bag, one not in the bag) in direct sunlight, or close to a very bright light.

Wait for two hours.

Open the bag, and take the temperature of the water in both glasses.

Note the difference between the measurements. Which one is warmer?

Why did this happen? As the sunlight (or bright light bulb) heated the water, the warmer air around the water was trapped inside the glass covered by the bag.

This is an example of how the Greenhouse Effect and the Earth’s atmosphere work – they are good things, to an extent, because they keep heat on our planet and prevent it from getting too cold, and that keeps us alive! But it’s a tricky balance, because by changing Earth’s atmosphere (or by using a thicker bag to cover our glass), we might increase the overall temperature of our planet.

This experiment shows how water can conduct and absorb heat.

Equipment needed:

Water

Balloons

A lit candle

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Blow up a balloon. Hold it over the lit candle. Boom! The balloon explodes! The lit candle heated the balloon, weakened and melted it, and the balloon exploded.

Now take another balloon, and fill it halfway with water.

Hold that same balloon over the candle. Do you think the balloon will explode, splashing water everywhere?

Nope.

You can have the candle flame actually touch the balloon, and the balloon won’t break!

The water in the balloon is absorbing the heat from the candle. The balloon conducts heat very well, so the candle flame transfers to the water without harming the balloon.

This is an experiment that shows the concept of heat being energy.

Equipment needed:

Hot water

Cold water

Two identical glasses

Liquid food coloring

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

As water gets warmer, water molecules move around faster and faster. We can’t see a molecule without help, of course, but we can still see the effects of hot and cold water molecules.

Fill your glasses. One should have hot water in it, the other cold water. Pick a color of food coloring.

Put three drops of food coloring in each glass.

Wait, and watch what happens.

You can tell from the food coloring which glass is holding the hot water, and which is holding the cold. The cold water contains less energy – the water molecules are moving slower, and therefore the coloring mixes slower.

The hot water’s molecules are moving faster – the water contains more heat, and therefore more energy. So the food coloring mixes faster.

Learn about buoyancy. Be able to answer the question: “How does a boat float?”

Equipment needed:

Play-Doh or some sort of modeling clay.

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Roll your Play-Doh or modeling clay into a ball:

Drop it into water. You’ll see it sink:

Next, take another handful of Play-Doh – use the same amount as before. Make a deep boat-like or cup shape, something similar to what you see here:

And put it in the water:

Why does our boat float? This experiment demonstrates the concept of buoyancy. Also called the “Archimedes principle“, this is what happens when a boat is placed in water: The water pushes back! The Archimedes principle tells us that an object in liquid is pushed upward by a weight equal to the amount of water the object displaced.

To put it simply: When you put your boat in water, how much water does the boat “push” out of the way? Take that water, and weigh it. That weight is the same weight pushing the boat “up” out of the water.

So in this case, the weight of our displaced water (the amount pushed out of the way) was more than the weight of the Play-Doh boat. That’s why our boat floats!

Note that the experiment above was done with Play-Doh. And a word of warning – this experiment is messy! Play-Doh (and I would assume other modeling clays) is water-soluable, unless you mold and harden the clay before dunking it. So the longer you leave the Play-Doh in the water, the more it will turn into a gooey, sticky mess. Parents and teachers, you’ve been warned. Kids, you’ll love it!