Ever since our first video that went viral in 2005, people have been dropping Mentos into Diet Coke and other sodas for fun and hopefully for a little science too. No one has been more creative than the guys at Eepy Bird, who recently built a car that runs on Coke and Mentos geysers. This is their second attempt at the car and after some modifications and test drives, they ran it at a local race track.

Their geyser soda car is built using 54 bottles of Coke Zero and 324 Mentos. It runs on a piston mechanism with 6′ tubes attached to the soda bottles. The tubes each have a 6′ rod inside. The pressure from the reaction pushes the rods out of the tubes to push the car off the wall. It’s all coasting from there.

The video of their geyser rocket car has become popular on YouTube. Unfortunately, this isn’t something anyone can build and run themselves. If you want to run your own version of the Mentos Geyser Rocket, check out our Mentos Geyser Car. It’s fun, it’s science and it fits in your arms. Read some reviews on the Geyser car for more information.

A teacher attending Julie Gintzler’s Story Time Slime this weekend in Springfield, Illinois took this picture of Julie launching a 12 foot geyser!

Julie left the bottles of Diet Coke in her car with a 104 degree heat index for the day. The hot soda was the perfect ingredient to blast some super high geysers. That may be one for the Geyser Hall of Fame.

While you may have never tried it, let’s be honest… you’ve thought about trying it… or making someone else try it. Drink as much Diet Coke as possible and then eat a few Mentos. It’s every 8th grader’s dream… either you spew a volcano of soda or you explode. Either way, it’s funny. Last night episode of Two and a Half Men just proves that one of the show’s writers is a science geek with a sense of humor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although I’m sure thousands of people (okay, 8th graders) have tried it, you just can’t turn your body into a human volcano with erupting geysers of diet soda. During the first year of my agreement with the company that makes Mentos (Perfetti Van Melle), there were rumors of a Brazilian boy who drank a bottle of soda and chased it with a roll of Mentos… and he exploded. I was asked by PVM to explain the science of why this can’t happen. This lead to the writers at snopes.com posting a great article on the Mentos and Diet Coke reaction with a reference to our site as part of the scientific rationale for why the rumor isn’t true.

But this hasn’t stopped a flurry of funny videos surfacing on Youtube. Super Burp has to be one of my favorites. Get ready… someone explodes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

… and the soda continues to fly. On August 22, 2010, Mexico City became the Guinness World Record holder for the largest number of simultaneously erupting Mentos and cola geysers on Saturday with 2,433 participants. The Mentos Geyser Tube Toy keeps the soda flying!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our own Julie Gintzler (follow @juliegintzler) is on hand in Danville, Illinois for a new Guinness World Record attempt for 2,500 MENTOS® powered soda geysers. The event organizers contacted Steve Spangler Science in their initial planning stages to see if they could gain some tips and tricks from our past MENTOS geyser records. When you’re attempting a geyser launch this big, you need a great trigger device… and that’s a perfect job for our Geyser Tube.

Be Amazing! Toys, the distributor and of Steve Spangler’s Geyser Tube toy, supported the event with the donation of the Geyser Tubes toys. “When Steve contacted us about the event and asked for Be Amazing! Toys to partner with him and share in our support, we were excited to participate,” said Marc Greenberg, Vice-President of Marketing at Be Amazing! Toys. “We know first hand the amount of effort it takes to pull off a Guinness World Record, and using the event to support Shaken Baby Syndrome is a great combination.”

A large crowd of people from Danville, Illinois came out this morning to have some fun and to support Reagan’s Rescue for Shaken Baby Syndrome. Julie Gintzler is at the event representing Steve Spangler Science and Be Amazing! Toys and will have the first video and photos in minutes.

It’s an e-mail that probably showed up in your inbox… Create an Exploding Drink! The prank is based on the widely known phenomenon of dropping MENTOS® chewy mints into soda to create an erupting geyser. Instead of just dropping the Mentos into soda, the pranksters suggest freezing a Mento in the middle of an ice cube. Serve your friend a refreshing soda drink and garnish with the tainted ice cubes. When the ice cube melts, the Mento is exposed and the soda erupts everywhere.

Great idea, right? I first saw the article in WIRED and blog sites like BoingBoing.net were quick to pick it up. Here’s the amazing part… there are literally hundreds and hundreds of comments about why it should or shouldn’t work, but up until today, I had yet to read about anyone who had actually tried it. If you really understand the science behind the physical reaction of releasing all of the carbon dioxide in the soda, you might guess that this is all a big hoax (not the first science experiment hoax we’ve seen in our inboxes).

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Reed, the VP of Technology for eSpeakers, at the Winter NSA Conference in Orlando.  Dave talked to me about the work he is doing in Mexico with his family and I gladly passed on a few science gadgets to take back to his home in Ajijic, Mexico.  As it turns out, the Mentos Geyser Tube™ is a hit in any country!  Dave sent me an email recently and let me know that his 10 year old son, Riley was the hit of his school’s science fair.  Dave was even kind enough to send some pictures of the Geyser Tube in action with his son.

I love hearing stories about how making science fun can overcome all boundaries, even those between countries!  Thanks Dave for the great follow-up and congratulations to Riley… keep up the great work and happy experimenting!

Ted Allen, host of Food Detectives on the Food Network, featured a segment using our Mentos Geyser Tube toy as a trigger device for their exploding soda segment. The producers did a nice job of explaining the science behind the eruption and even shared a cool variation of slowly lowering several Mentos into the bottle using a piece of wire. The demo showed why the Mentos have to quickly sink to the bottom of the bottle if you want to get a huge eruption. In their explanation, the microbiologist expert said that diet soda is used because the aspartame weakened the surface tension of the liquid which aided in the eruption. However, we know from experimentation that regular soda works well, too. Does regular sugar also weaken the surface tension? Dropping Mentos into plain seltzer water produces almost no eruption. Does this suggest that the surface tension of the liquid is higher in the plain seltzer water than it is in regular soda or diet soda?

You see… that’s why the Mentos soda geyser keeps showing up time and time again. The exploding soda is cool, but trying to uncover the real science behind the reaction always leads you yet another question… and another reason to drop more Mentos into soda.

After launching thousands and thousands of Mentos Geysers, we like to eat Mentos as much as we play with them. We also love to chew Mentos gum, but learned early on that Mentos gum doesn’t work for the old geyser trick. The guys in the video below discovered the same thing. After watching the video a few times, our consensus is that all 250 bottles didn’t actually get Mentos gum (the students would have been just a little more upset with the cost of wasting 250 bottles of soda and 1000 pieces of gum), but you be the judge. The loading device, on the other hand, is very cool. Nice job.

It’s tough to really demonstrate the Mentos Geyser Tube in an exhibit hall filled with teahcers… until we created the Mentos Geyser Chamber. It’s a plastic box that measures 4 feet square and 7 feet tall. It’s the perfect enclosure to launch off a few hundred Mentos Diet Coke geysers. The only other thing you need is someone to stand inside the box for a few hours. Most of the time, Drew Vriesman is an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying marketing. But when he puts on his intern hat at Steve Spangler Science, he’s never quite sure what to expect. Drew Vriesman and Taylor Marsh took turns launching geysers at the NAEYC 2008 conference in Dallas. Combined they launched 700 erupting Diet Coke geysers using over 4,000 MENTOS® Chewy Mints. The interns spent about 20 hours in the Geyser Box over three days and entertained (or amused) about 15,000 teachers who stopped by the Steve Spangler Science booth.

It was quite a week for our Spangler Science team when we invaded Texas with 24 staff members and Spangler Ambassadors. Half the team headed to Fort Worth for CAST (the Conference for the Advancement of Science Teaching) and half the team went to Dallas for NAEYC ( the National Association for the Education of Young Children). While our NAEYC team was launching Mentos geysers on the Boy in a Box, the CAST team also found a unique way to use the Geyser Tube… launching our favorite scientist, Beaker , 30-feet in the air in the Geyser Chamber. It was quite a sight at the Spangler Science booth when Beaker when shooting through the air on a stream of Diet Coke.

When the team wasn’t launching stuffed Muppets, they were busy talking with excited science teachers and even presenting workshops at the conference. Spangler Speaker Julie Gintzler presented her Chicka, Chicka – KABOOM workshop. The eager participants were more than a little excited when Julie pulled out the amazing Square Bubble and the “magical” Spot Dot Thumb… now there’s way to get kids excited about learning! Spangler Ambassador Mary Pat Weingardt also presented a workshop where she had the opportunity to get in-depth with the participants and discuss their concerns and frustrations with combining science and curriculum.

If you attended the annual NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) conference last week in Dallas, Texas, it wasn’t hard to find the Steve Spangler Science booth. All you had to do was listen for the shouts of surprise as we launched over 600 Mentos Geysers with the Geyser Tube™ in our own take on the classic dunk tank… the Boy in a Box. It was great to see the teacher reactions when they pulled the string and sent a blast of Coke raining down on our never-tiring Boys in a Box.

As my team can attest, I lost my voice at the conference… just like I do every year… from explaining to everyone who passed by the science behind the Mentos and Diet Coke reaction.  It’s important as educators that we don’t just drop some Mentos in a Coke and call it science.  The resulting geyser is a great effect, but you are missing the key piece of the lesson.  Shoot off a geyser, then listen as your students start to ask questions… “Why does that happen?”…  “What if we used more Mentos?”… “What if we didn’t use Diet Coke?”.  Now you’ve got it.  Not only are you creating an unforgettable learning experience, but you are setting the gears running for your students to wonder, explore and create.  Put those questions into action and you are teaching even the youngest scientists the fundamentals of the scientific method.  Change the number of Mentos in the tube, try different types of soda, ignite curiosity in your students.

I also had the honor of speaking to over 1,000 teachers in a 60-minute workshop at the conference.  If you attended the workshop, hopefully, you would agree that this wasn’t your average teacher workshop.  In the course of an hour we launched potatoes, made a confetti snow storm, launched even more Mentos geysers and ended with an outrageous Liquid Nitrogen Explosion.

As always, our team is so excited to have the opportunity to meet so many amazing early childhood teachers and learn how they are using science to get their students excited about learning.  If you saw us at the conference leave a comment below and let us know how you are using these methods to make your classroom amazing.

If you’ve followed us over the years, you know that NAEYC (the National Association for the Education of Young Children) is the first teacher conference where we introduced the famous Mentos Geyser Experiment. In 2006, we launched 700 geysers in the open air on the trade show floor. The Geyser Chamber made its debut in 2007 to show how the geyser shoots 30 feet in the air. This year it’s Boy in a Box… a clear plastic container measuring 4′ x 4′ x 7′ where geysers fly at the rate of 30 per hour (watch the streaming video). It’s easy to find the Steve Spangler Science booth in the NAEYC exhibit hall – just listen for the screams followed by applause.

It’s probably the most asked question we get… “How exactly does that experiment with the Mentos and Diet Coke really work?” From the outset (nearly eight years ago), we hypothesized that the exploding soda was a physical reaction, and the key factor in the release of carbon dioxide was the microscopic pits on the surface

of the chewy mint. However, there was no real scientific study that anyone could point to as the definitive answer… until now. In the June issue of the American Journal of Physics, Tonya S. Coffey, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Appalachian State University, in Boone, N.C., and her team of fearless physics students reported on the ingredients, temperature dependence, duration, and other parameters of the suddenly famous Mentos-Diet Coke reaction.

There has been considerable debate over gum arabic (found in the coating of the mint) and the role it plays in the physical reaction. Coffey’s group was able to confirm that the surfactant gum arabic is a key component of the reaction: It reduces surface tension, thereby allowing the soda’s carbon dioxide to make an especially rapid escape from the bottle.

The diet beverage’s aspartame and potassium benzoate provide a one-two punch to further reduce surface tension and ease bubble formation. This dynamic duo is more effective than sugar and creates a bigger explosion.

Read more about the Soda-Candy Explosions in the Chemical & Engineering News.

In our continuing quest to find interesting blogs and bloggers, we ran into Leah Simmers Photography Blog, where she was capturing her experience with Mentos and Diet Coke. Thanks to Leah for letting us share some her unique geyser pictures here. Check out Leah’s full blog post here. And yes, that is the Geyser Tube she’s using to launch that screaming geyser.

Sean Moncrieff is the host of the Afternoon Show on Newstalk 106-108 FM in Ireland. This nationally syndicated show features news stories ranging from the serious to the zany… maybe that’s why they called. While waiting for my segment, I listened to the show and quickly realized how much I want to speak again in Ireland. I first lectured at the Irish Science Teachers Association in 1997 and again in 2000. I shared a few science demos and they taught me the finer points of drinking lots of Irish beer. Here’s my interview with Moncrieff.

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So, America throws it back to the Europeans… from Louisville, KY to Turiba University in Latvia there is a new Mentos and Diet Coke World record. On June 19th, 1,911 students from Business University Turiba in Latvia launched an amazing geyser eruption and landed themselves in the Guinness Book of World Records, just over a month after students at Male High School in Kentucky launched 1,800 simultaneous geysers to earn their own world record status. The Latvian University students were celebrating the school’s 15th anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than with Mentos and Diet Coke. Check out the video of this monumental occasion. Now, who’s next…

Not to be out-done by Europeans, students at Male High School in Louisville, KY, set off 300 more geysers than the previous record-breaking effort just a few months ago in Belgium. School officials thought exploding Diet Coke and MENTOS would be a great way for students to blow off a little steam before finals and celebrate a great school year. The students were recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the new official record holders with 1800 geysers. All proceeds from the event were donated to the Ronald McDonald House. Congrats to Male High School students… now who will be next in the race for a new geyser world record?

There is a waiting list for parents who want to enroll their children in the Henny Penny Preschool, and there is a good reason for that: Amy Dolley has created one of the best preschool environments I’ve ever seen! Amy doesn’t even have to advertise… word of mouth is what sells the Henny Penny Preschool.

Amy wasn’t comfortable with the kind of preschool her own children had attended, so she decided to create a livelier, more “hands-on” environment when she quit her Kindergarten and 1^st grade teaching job and started her own preschool right in her home.

She knew she could do it, too. After all, as the Story Lady, she had built her “clientele” from five children –three of which were her own – to over fifty kids! Obviously, Amy knew how to reach and teach small children, and with her own school, she knew she would get to do “what she wants, how she wants.” And what Amy wanted to do was create an environment that allowed small children to run and play, to get muddy and wet, and to learn about the world around them in ways that would be remembered and passed along to others! “Dogs, mud, and hands-on” are some of her secrets for getting young children interested in science.

Amy was worried about the science lessons, though. She had never felt comfortable teaching science because she didn’t know then what she knows now: “you don’t have to be good at science to love it, and when you love science, that attitude is passed along to your students!”

Amy’s husband, Craig, as “Mr. Wiz,” volunteers at the preschool and presents a science experiment each week, and when I say “presents,” what I really mean is “encourages the children to put their hands on things, get messy with it, laugh and chatter with excitement, and take the lesson home to the dinner table to share with siblings and parents.” To quote Amy, “We made our own curriculum because it’s important for kids to move, grow, explode, and fly.”

That’s the real deal, you see. When a child is so excited about what he has learned that day, that he can’t wait to get home and share it with family and friends, that’s genuine education. Craig and Amy Dolley’s students almost always go home to chatter excitedly about what Mr. Wiz helped them do that day.

The Dolleys credit our own SteveSpanglerScience.com website with providing a launching pad for many of their science lessons.

Amy says that “. . . Steve did the tough part – we just follow his lead!”

The Dolleys discovered Steve Spangler Science while surfing the internet for science ideas, and once they found us, they felt as though they’d struck gold. Amy says that she spent hours on our website that first day, watching video after video, clicking links and taking in all in.

Craig Dolley, as Mr. Wiz, was determined to have a science curriculum that excited the kids, not the typical demonstration/worksheet curriculum so many schools still have today. Craig wishes ALL public school teachers would learn how to teach the Steve Spangler way – with enthusiasm, joy, and obvious love of their subject areas. Craig understands that a teacher learns along with the kids, and that if there is too much explaining and not enough hands-on, not many lessons will be taken home to be demonstrated at the dinner table or in the back yard.

“Even the kids’ parents get excited when they see that Mr. Wiz is at the school today,” says Craig. “They know something wonderful is going to happen! And then the kids go home and gather their friends together to teach them what Mr. Wiz taught them that day. That’s what it’s all about!”

It’s not just the kids who take the experiments home to share, either. Amy employs several other teachers in her preschool, and they take the experiments home to THEIR kids, too!

Craig and Amy both say that “Steve made our jobs easy.” This hands-on approach is much more vital than a regular school textbook, and I’m sure many more students than just the Dolley’s daughter have a Harry Potter book under that boring science book.

Amy says that “The science is easy now; I used to dread the science lessons, and now I love them. It saddens me that so many kids don’t get this kind of lesson in their school, because no one is ever too old for hands-on! Teaching science the Spangler way isn’t even that hard; it’s mostly FUN! Our daughter is jealous because, as she puts it, ‘mine is so boring, and you get to have fun all the time.’”

Both Craig and Amy agree that the Spangler science activities “. . . relax the whole day! Everyone is more laid-back after participating in a fun and exciting science activity, because it’s so important to both body and mind to be allowed to just ‘let go’ sometimes.”

“Steve really does a service to parents and teachers; it’s been truly amazing at our preschool this year,” says Amy. “Our students are so young that it’s not really why or how that matters; it’s that they LOVED THE SCIENCE, and wanted to do more and more of it.”

Amy’s favorite experiment is the Mentos Geyser, and she saves that one for the last day of school. She has discovered that the cheaper the cola, the better the results. As for the childrens’ favorite experiment, “Each is a favorite to a different child.”

Amy and Craig “Mr. Wiz” Dolley, and even their dog, all work together at the Henny Penny Preschool to make sure their students go home every day with their heads full of new knowledge, their bodies exercised and rested, and their whole being full of the excitement of it all and the desire to share it with everyone they know.

Thank you, Craig and Amy, for allowing us to be a part of your world for a little while. Keep up the good work!

]]> http://www.stevespangler.com/teaching-moments/interview-with-craig-and-amy-dolley/feed/ 1 http://www.stevespangler.com/mentos-experiment/new-weezer-video-features-mentos-geyser-and-everybody-else/ http://www.stevespangler.com/mentos-experiment/new-weezer-video-features-mentos-geyser-and-everybody-else/#comments Sun, 25 May 2008 05:17:39 +0000 Jane http://www.stevespangler.com/?p=812 Weezer has a new video up on YouTube and guess who’s in it? EVERYONE. Well, every YouTube star you can think of seems to have a cameo, including the EepyBird Guys doing their Mentos Experiment #771. The song is called Pork and Beans and the video is great. Congratulations to Stephen and Fritz (the EepyBird [...]]]>

Weezer has a new video up on YouTube and guess who’s in it? EVERYONE. Well, every YouTube star you can think of seems to have a cameo, including the EepyBird Guys doing their Mentos Experiment #771. The song is called Pork and Beans and the video is great. Congratulations to Stephen and Fritz (the EepyBird Guys) for hitting a home run with Weezer.