Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi, I am doing my science project on ice cream melting. I want to see which one melts first and fastest. I am using regular vanilla ice cream, vanilla light ice cream and maybe vanilla low fat frozen yogurt. I would like to use a safe way to melt and think a hair dyer will work. Can you tell me if I am going in the right direction? Is there another way for me to test? Do you know of other sites that I can look at for research help? Thank you for your help.

This sounds like a fun experiment.

Here is a Science Buddies experiment that is similar: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p049.shtml

It should give you some ideas about how to study ice cream melting.

You mentioned using a hair dryer. I think that is not a good idea. What you will need to do is to apply the same amount of heat to each sample of ice cream you are studying and then time the melting process, as described in the Science Buddies ice melting experiment. If you use a hair dryer, the amount of heat you actually apply will most like be quite different from one sample to the other. It will depend on how close you are to the sample, the actual shape of the sample, the temperature of the air coming out of the dryer, and a few other things like that.

Just letting the ice cream sit at room temperature would make sure each sample is at the same temperature. If that is too slow for you, you could put the samples in a slightly warm oven.

Good luck and have fun.