Steve Spangler Science Experiments Review & Giveaway

Sci­ence is some­thing that can so often bore me. Why? Because it is often taught or pre­sented in such a bor­ing man­ner. Who wants to hear some­one lec­ture about how a hydro­gen fuel cell car works? Not me! I’d rather SEE how a hydro­gen full cell car works. This is where Steve Span­gler Sci­ence comes in. If you aren’t sure who Steve Span­gler is, check out Wikipedia for the details.

The online store has some of the coolest sci­ence exper­i­ments I have ever seen. I have 4 curi­ous kids so I knew that this was going to be a fun review. They sent me 3 prod­ucts to review:

• Hydro­gen Fuel Cell Car
• Water Cubes
• Men­tos Geyser Tube

I’m not going to get into the specifics of what we learned in the exper­i­ments because I think the fun of doing an exper­i­ment is to make your cre­ate your own hypoth­e­sis and either prove or dis­prove it.

Hydro­gen Fuel Cell Car

We started with the Hydro­gren Fuel Cell Car. We were unable to watch the DVD that came with the kit because it was only com­pat­i­ble with Win­dows and I have a Mac. My 10 yr old daugh­ter and I read through all the direc­tions and began to put the car together. We did have a hard time with some of the direc­tions not being really clear, but when I asked my 13 yr old son to help us out, he had an eas­ier time with the directions.

I’m not sure if it makes a dif­fer­ence, but the direc­tions tell you to use dis­tilled water, but every­where else on the box or in the list of items needed, it states just water. We had to put the project on hold while we ran for some dis­tilled water because I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference.

Once we got the car put together and saw those bub­bles come up and made the final con­nec­tion, there was sheer excite­ment in the air. We did it! We made a hydro­gen fuel cell car. It was really cool to see how it all worked. We went online and googled hydro­gen fuel cell cars to learn more.

This is def­i­nitely a project for an older child. My 13 yr old son was the per­fect age. I would say any­thing younger than 12, prob­a­bly will need some help. Here is a video of our experience:

Water Cubes

Next, we moved on to the water cubes. These are small poly­mer clear cubes that grow to almost 200 times their size when put in water.  For this one, I enlisted the help of my 6 yr old son and 10 yr old daugh­ter. They each got a plas­tic cup and dropped 3 tiny poly­mer cubes into the water and then we watched and waited and waited…for 24 hours. Ok, we didn’t stand and wait for 24 hours, but we kept check­ing the cubes quite often.

The kids thought this was really fun to watch because they could see grad­ual changes in the cube. They now want to take the whole bag of tiny cubes and put them in a tub full of water to see what hap­pens. I have not decided yet wether we will do it.  Watch the video to see what we discovered.

Men­tos Geyser Tube

We saved the one with the biggest punch for last. We had seen this one on YouTube before so my kids were really excited to do this at home. I gath­ered the whole fam­ily plus a few neigh­bor kids for the big explo­sion. We had pur­chased 2 bot­tles of diet Sprite (diet because the direc­tions said it packs more for the punch and Sprite because it is less messy). I can explain this one, but it’s a whole lot bet­ter to show you.

If you are going to learn about sci­ence, the ONLY way to do that is to try some exper­i­ments. It sure beats a lec­ture. You can see the excite­ment in all my kids over these exper­i­ments. Usu­ally when I recieve a box of prod­uct to review, my kids say, “oh more stuff for Mom.” But this time, they wanted to know when we got to do the exper­i­ments and were all yelling, “Cool! I love what you do, Mom.”

Steve Span­gler Face­book Fan Page

Con­test

Steve Span­gler Sci­ence is offer­ing to send one of my read­ers the same three exper­i­ments that I reviewed above. You must live in the U.S. to enter the con­test. This would make an excel­lent edu­ca­tional and fun Christ­mas gift for your kids. Con­test ends at 11:49pm EST on Decem­ber 4, 2009. I will draw the name ran­domly on Decem­ber 5th and win­ner will be noti­fied via email.

Con­test Entry

To enter
Visit the Steve Span­gler Sci­ence online cat­a­log and find ONE prod­uct that you think is pretty cool AND not men­tioned here in my review. Put a link to it in the com­ments below.

For extra entries, please leave one sep­a­rate com­ment below for each of the extra entries.

1. Visit the Steve Span­gler blog and fol­low the RSS feed.
2. Fol­low @ScienceToys on Twit­ter.
3. Fol­low @Spanglerscience on Twit­ter.
4. Fol­low @Stevespangler on Twit­ter
5. Con­nect to my blog using the Google Friend Con­nect on the right side of my blog.
6. Fol­low my blog using either RSS or by email.

dis­clo­sure: Steve Span­gler Sci­ence sent (free) me the 3 experiements for this review.

Tagged as: coolest science, curious kids, fuel cell car, fuel cell cars, hydrogen fuel cell, hydrogen fuel cell car, hydrogen fuel cell cars, hydrogen fuel cell experiment, mentos gyeser, science, sheer excitement, Steve Spangler, Steve Spangler Science, steve spangler science experiments, water cubes