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I love Halloween. One of my favorite activities is to “carve” pumpkins using a simple reation inside the fruit. First, you carve the face then carefully replace pieces. After creating a reaction by generating a gas inside and igniting it (ask your local chemistry teacher for the details) the face pieces are blown off with a small explosion.
Halloween is more than 100 days away and I just couldn’t wait. So I initiated the new weather anchor at the local Denver television station by introducing her to carving watermelons. The problem was, we didn’t really carve the watermelon, it exploded. Watch the Video to see how we skipped right over the carving and went straight to exploding.
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July 24th, 2007 at 7:35 am
I teach high school drop-outs/disenfranchised students in GED subjects. I would like to do the exploding watermelon experiment, but am not a science teacher (social studies major). How do you generate the gas to cause the explosion? Appreciate your assistance.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:18 am
The best advice is to pay a visit to your favorite chemistry teacher and ask her to do the Exploding Pumpkin/Watermelon demo for your students. The gas you’re generating is a small amount of acetylene. Your chemistry teacher probably has the write-up from Flinn Scientific.
August 1st, 2007 at 9:20 am
Hello Steve, I teach chemistry at Laboratory primary school state university of Malang for grade 7 and 8. My country is Indonesia. I so interest with your experiment about exploding watermelon. This experiment can give me more information about chemical reaction surrounding us. I will tray to do this experiment with my student. Tanks steve…
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Hi Steve,
I teach chemistry and would love to do this demonstration the first day of school. I tried to search Flinn to find the write up, but was unsuccessful. Can you point me in the right direction?
Thank you for all that you do!
Amanda
August 6th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Check out the info on the Pumkin page.
See #9.
http://www.stevespangler.com/archives/2004/10/28/exploding-pumpkins/