Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, my daughter wants to see how using three different activators (borax, liquid starch, and contact lens solution) affect the viscosity of the slime. We used the sciencebuddies experiment with contact lens solution as a starting point.

We may have an issue now because I was thing that the activator was the lone item changing each time, however now I see that contact lens solution also requires baking soda to be used while the others don’t. Will that mess up having only one dependent variable? Can I consider the activators as a whole being the “one thing” (I.e borax and water, CL solution and baking soda)?

Any advice?

Hello,

This sounds like a fun project! You can consider the activators as a whole being the one variable that changes and still use these results.

As a secondary experiment to investigate the effect of baking soda you could repeat creating the contact lens solution slime with and without baking soda to see how this impacts the qualities of the slime.

Audrey