They tested four options (applesauce, commercially-made egg replacer, aquafaba (the liquid leftover from cooking chickpeas), and ground flax seed) in their baked good of choice: traditional Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies. All in all they ended up baking 8 batches of cookies, 4 for our initial taste taste with families members and 4 to bring to the fair because they decided it wasn't fair to display a project about chocolate chip cookies without offering people some!
They hypothesized that the egg replacer would work the best as it is specifically made for that purpose.
The actual results varied. Our first taste test had a clear winner - the aquafaba. In those batches the cookies were significantly different from batch to batch. But the second time around, the cookies from all four replacers were similar and the egg replacer won by a couple of votes. We think the difference between the two experiments was the outside temperature - the first time it was a moderate 60-something degrees. The second? Around 90.
Either way, we now know our top 2 replacers and we all got to eat a lot of chocolate chip cookies. So no complaints here!
The kids presented the project at the ENRICHri Science Fair which Andrew helped run. He did a fabulous job turning the fair into an interactive event with activities, experiments, and demonstrations to give the kids a hands-on experiment.
Ben was quite thrilled with an experiment to build a boat out of aluminum foil and see how many pennies it can hold before it sinks. His design was very simple. It was so simple, in fact, that the adults standing around were all thinking that it would sink with the first penny. But we all watched in amazement as he kept adding coins.
A few people asked me if we had already done the experiment at home, but we hadn't and when asked Ben just said that he thought about it and decided that if there were more room for the pennies and they were spread out, it could hold more. It ended up holding about 200! It would have held more but towards the end he was piling all the coins in the center rather than spreading them out and the middle finally sank. He was ecstatic with his result and the rest of us were very impressed with his engineering mindset!
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