| Today I came back to class from 3 days of missing school (Friday + weekend). When we got to Chemistry, we checked our rock candy right away. We realized that nothing happened, and went on with our next experiment planning. After awhile, someone in my group checked the one in the far back that we did with 1 cup of water and 3 cups of sugar, and no flavoring. The rock crystals had started to form like it did in every youtube video and I ist, and we were all really excited, even though our individual ones didn't work. Our group one was pretty excited and I'm thrilled to see it grow over the next week while we continue with our new projects. |
In reality, we never expected this to work. In the end we realized that there is a specific ratio for it to work the way we want it to. We found that for it to work, the ratio should be 1:3. 1 cup of water, for every 3 cups of sugar. It also depends that you heat the water to where there is steam coming off of the water, so that when the sugar is poured in, there's plenty of opportunity for it to be covered after you pour it in the cup. When the cup is covered, it allows the evaporation to happen. The water evaporates enough for the sugar molecules to latch on to each other and form into sugar squares. Another important part for the rock candy to form, is to wet the string or stick and cover it in sugar, so that the new coming sugar crystals can latch on and grow onto existing sugar. From our observation, the top of the rock candy seems to be growing like squares, and just seem to connect to each other. It's so cool to see tiny little grains of sugar turn into squares of sugar. I really benefited from this project because I got to see something form that I didn't know how formed.