As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s always fun to stumble across Quirkles videos on YouTube. These fun children’s books support connecting science and literature, which is one of our passions around Steve Spangler Science. This week, Quirkles co-founder Terri Johnson, headed back to Ozarks First KOLR 10 news to show off some of the cool properties of Oobleck… the cornstarch and water quicksand. Terri had a great time getting messy with the KOLR 10 anchor and even made mention of the growing popularity of walking on “water” with the gooey Oobleck. If you are a fan of Spangler Science or the Ellen Degeneres show, you probably remember when I stormed the stage of the Ellen show with a cement truck, a few hundred gallons of water, 2,500 boxes of cornstarch and a very brave audience member, who walked across a giant pool of Oobleck! It’s great to see Terri in her Spangler Science tie dye lab coat playing with the “Zop”! The set of all 26 wild and wacky Quirkles books can be bought on our site at SteveSpanglerScience.com.
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Time Warp is one of Discovery’s newest shows and it’s definitely worth watching… even if you’re not a science geek. Hosts Jeff Lieberman and Matt Kearney are on the prowl for anything and everything that might be cool to examine under high-speed photography. On the November 5, 2008 episode, Time Warp featured the Cornstarch Walk on Water stunt our team created for the Ellen Show back in February.
It’s good to see that our mixing proportions of 2,500 pounds of cornstarch to about 200 gallons of water – all mixed in a cement truck – worked well for them, too. The best part of the segment was the slow motion photography showing just how the non-Newtonian cornstarch and water mixtures behaves under stress. The images are nothing short of amazing.
Mixing 2,500 pounds of cornstarch with the kitchen mixer just didn’t work, so we had to find a cement truck… and a very cool cement truck mixing guy. Oh, and you also need three people who know exactly what the cornstarch mixer should feel like when it’s perfectly mixed. Jeff, Carly and Renee served as the mixologists while I called the producer at the Ellen Show to let him know that we were ready to roll to the studio.
The final step is to drive the cement truck filled with 2,500 pounds of cornstarch and 250 gallons of water to the back lot at the Ellen Show and pour the goo into a giant bathtub – 7 feet long, 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It’s also a good idea to have your oobleck mixing experts change their clothes and spend the next 4 hours mixing the goo by hand to ensure the perfect consistency right before the tub gets moved on stage. How do you move a tub that weighs about 6,000 pounds? Using a forklift, of course.
