This week, our 6th grade STEAM classes had fun making and experimenting with oobleck! Oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid; it acts like a solid when you apply force to it, but acts more like a liquid when you don’t, thus defying Newton’s law of viscosity. It’s also sticky and gross, a fun yet fascinating blob!
STEAM teacher Shannon LaChance kicked off this multi-day lesson by introducing the students to non-Newtonian fluids, then the classes read Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck, in which a kingdom gets gummed up by a sticky green ooze. Next, the students mixed up their own oobleck using water and corn starch (plus a little food coloring to give it an appropriately “blecky” look), and conducted tests to see if their oobleck had more solid or more liquid properties.
