Designer Samantha Taylor shares her son’s Science Fair Project and how Glue Dots kept it all together.
Money can be dirty after passing through so many hands, so we decided to experiment with what might work best to clean it. We chose 4 different solutions to test out.
We found pennies that had about the same amount of grime on them – four to clean and one to use as a reference for how dirty the penny started out.
One at a time we put each penny in a solution, scrubbed it a bit with a different toothbrush, and rinsed it off.
We used Permanent Glue Dots to attach the pennies to paper that had been sectioned off for each solution. With the pennies attached we could directly compare and contrast them according to the solution used to clean them (and with them glued in place, we didn’t have to worry that they would accidentally get mixed up).
When we were done we found that the lemon juice and salt worked the best, the ketchup was a close second, vinegar did an okay job, and baking soda was by far the worst.
We hypothesized that our lemon juice/salt mix and Ketchup must have worked the best because they both have a bit of grit to them to help scrub the dirt off. Additionally both mixes have a pH value that makes them a base, and that seemed to work well. Vinegar is base as well, but had no particles in it to help scour the penny, so it didn’t work as well. Baking soda has a pH that reveals it to be an acid, so perhaps pennies are better cleaned with bases than acids.
What are your science fair projects about?
Thanks for stopping by!
~Samantha Taylor
