Melt Away Your Troubles

​Challenge
Happy New Year! It was officially winter on December 21st and that means the weather will continue changing this month to be more winter-ish. Colder temperatures could mean snow and ice and the possibility of water freezing on the roads and sidewalks. How does this happen? What makes the snow/water turn to ice? Better yet, what is the best way to get rid of the ice on the sidewalks or roads to prevent accidents? Snowplows do their best to prevent accidents but what are they spreading on the road? Is there something better? What do you spread on your sidewalk to get rid of the ice? Which dissolvent works the fastest? Your challenge is to figure out which ice melter is the best.

Your challenge does have some criteria and constraints. The ice cubes being used for the test should be from the same water source, the same approximate size, and conducted at the same time of an experiment. Make sure to also continually check the experiment and during the same time intervals.

Materials

• ice cube trays
• small containers for the ice cube melting
• ice cubes
• measuring device
• magnifier
• sand, dirt, tiny pebbles
• various ice melters and/or salt (non-iodized salt, iodized salt, kosher salt, rock salt, sea salt, etc. and/or store-bought ice melts)

Hints and Tips for Success

1. Allow students planning and discussion time by having them examine the various melters to see how they are differently composed such as size, shape, color, and even names. A magnifier or microscope might help with some of these items.
2. After examining, allow student groups to plan their experiment. For the first experiment, you may want students to test each melter separately on small pieces of ice to get an idea on how each melter reacts to the ice. For the following experiments, allow students to mix different melters together and add any other materials they think will help the process.
3. For differentiation, adjust the amount of materials available and allowed to use, add any additional materials, take away certain materials, allow students to shake their containers. Adjustments could be made to make it more challenging or simpler.
4. Make sure to standardize the experiment and the amount of melter to use. For example, if students want to individually test out all of the melters first, they should use the same amount of the melter on the ice. Also, a standardized way of measuring the melted ice needs to be considered. Students may think of finding the mass of the ice before and after it’s been melted.
5. Discuss pros and cons of the different ice melters and of the experiment. For example, one might be more expensive than another or in our experiment the temperature is warmer inside than when being outside so the ice could have melted not because of the chosen melter.
6. Connect to science by discussing weather, properties of matter, or chemistry.
7. Connect to ELA by reading about melting and freezing such as Why Does Ice Melt (How? What? Why?) by Jim Pipe, which has additional activities on melting and heating, or Snowplows by Rebecca Pettiford to discover how a snowplow gets the job done.