"Density bottle" - Sophia Rowen

The density bottle is a clear bottle with clear liquid and white beads and blue beads inside. You can pick it up, look at it and shake it. At first, the phenomenon to be observed is not obvious. I myself stood there and shared the bottle for minutes until I realized something significant about the beads. After aggressively shaking the bottle, I watched as the white and blue beads separated from each other. The white beads found themselves hovering above the blue beads and stayed this way until finding themselves closer together again- but still not mixed. You can lay the bottle sideways and the beads have a similar behavior, they don't mix.

Then you notice the appearance of the liquid inside the bottle. It has particles floating around and you think to yourself, hmm this probably isn't just water then. You might begin to think that it is a mixture of some oil and water. So now you notice that the liquid inside is of a certain density, and you infer that the different color beads have different densities as well. This would make sense since the blue beads float below the white beads, making the blue beads more dense than the white beads.

You can even put the density bottle out in the sun. After being in the sun for a couple minutes, the liquid inside the bottle has separated and the top is now yellow while the bottom is clear. The white beads still float above the blue beads yet the color of the water is now yellow on the upper half of the bottle. This occurs because the white beads are actually UV beads.

The density bottle gets people to think like engineers. The phenomenon observed forces people to investigate the properties and uses of the materials. By shaking the bottle and observing what happens you are able to make evidence based decisions, envision solutions, and assess the implications of those solutions. I found that those around me were able to communicate what they believed to be happening with the help of facilitation. In this sense, it is beneficial to work in teams because more ideas are put forth and attempted.

At the end of exploring the density bottle, I came up with some questions that guests or I might propose: can we have a separate density bottle with no beads? and what would happen if we used a different sized bottle? and Have you experienced something similar to this phenomenon in your everyday life?