Watermelon Experiment

This afternoon we conducted a science experiment. We asked ourselves: Can a rubber band cut a watermelon? If so, how many rubber bands would it take?

We made some predictions, some children saying as few as 5 rubber bands, other as many as 100,000.

It took quite a while, and we managed to load the watermelon with about 650 rubber bands before it exploded. Here are some photo's of our experiment. We also have a video, I will post this early next week. Robert and Manav managed to catch the last few seconds in slow motion.

The scientific reason as to why this worked was because of "Elastic Potential Energy". The rubber bands store the energy we put into them by stretching them and use this to cut the watermelon.

Temima was helping record the number of rubber bands that were going on the watermelons.