Watching chocolate melt!

Beech Class wanted to see how a solid reacts to temperature in science this week, so we melted chocolate!

The experiment aimed to find out what temperature melted chocolate the fastest. No surprises that floating tins with pieces of chocolate on icy water yielded no change! The chocolate had not reached its melting point.

However, in water between 30 and 40 degrees celsius the chocolate took around four minutes to melt. Then whacking up the heat to 50-60 degrees celsius saw fast results with the chocolate melting in under two minutes.

The experiment showed a number of things: How heating chocolate is a reversible change (as we put the melted chocolate in the fridge and saw it go hard again). Also how hotter water melts chocolate faster, making the particles move quicker and more freely into its liquid state.

After the children wrote up their experiments, their reward for a hard afternoon of science was…you guessed it, chocolate!