TheBanyanTree: Explosive fun!

[Sachet]

Remember the video of the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment that went
around online a few months ago?

Well, this past Wednesday MythBusters did a show on it and it was such
fascinating fun. They isolated all the ingredients to figure out what
was causing the reaction. It was very cool. Especially because the guys
can never leave well enough alone so they had to push the parameters up
several notches and had Coke shooting 40 feet into the air. <g> For us
normal folk,  it's an impressive 10 feet or so.

I was so intrigued and decided that it would be an outstanding
educationally fun thing to do for my 7 year old student at work the next
day. He's working on learning how to grasp the concept of before and
after, peer play, language skills, along with several other things. So
I'm going to use this as a stepping stone.

But for the first run we just did the one try. I wasn't sure how it was
going to work out, but WOW what an easy & FUN thing to do!! Some of the
other tutors kept coming around asking me when we were going to do it.
They were as antsy and excited as the kids. So this is impressive and
compelling fun for adults, too! <g>

It was awesome! The Coke exploded upward *immediately* after I dropped 4
Mentos into the bottle. It was like seeing a brown bubbly version of Old
Faithful!

A few notes that I learned from MythBusters...Diet Coke works best. (I
picked up some generic diet cola on the way home just to compare and so
Zach could do the experiment too, and it worked pretty well, but not
quite as well as the actual diet Coke product.) And they have to be the
white Mentos, not the green ones.

You have to stack the Mentos between your fingers (at least 3-4) so that
when you release them they slide in all at once. There is NO time to
drop them in one at a time. Be sure and lean back so you don't initially
get a face full of pop and then run back so you don't get drenched in
the cascading deluge.

I'm going to pick up a few more bottles of Diet Coke and more Mentos so 
we can do
this several times. It happens so fast, which is impressive, but you
need to have enough supplies on hand for everyone to have a turn.

MythBusters web site: *http://tinyurl.com/td0l

More info about the experiment: **http://tinyurl.com/eashu*

...Sachet