In this science project, you will make slime with different amounts of contact lens solution. Changing the recipe can change the properties of the slime! In science, a property is something about a material that you can observe and measure, for example its weight, color, or stickiness. You might wonder if it matters how much borax you add to the glue. It contains other ingredients (boric acid and sodium borate) that react with baking soda (another ingredient in your slime) to make borax. In this project, you will use contact lens solution to make slime. Straight polymer chains (left) are linked together by borax to form a cross-linked polymer (right). This makes it harder for the polymer chains to slide around, making the glue thicker and turning it into "slime."įigure 1. The borax helps make connections between each of the polymer chains, as shown in Figure 1. This changes, however, when you mix the glue with borax. The polymer chains can slide across each other easily, making the glue runny and "liquidy" (think of dumping a bunch of fresh-cooked spaghetti out of a pot). The polymer chains in the Elmer's glue are long and very straight. Polymers are long chain-shaped molecules. The ingredients used for slime usually include Elmer's® glue and borax. What is slime actually made of? If you have made slime before, you probably followed a recipe to put different ingredients together, similar to baking a cake. Chemists are interested in finding out what different materials, such as slime, are made of, how these materials behave, and how they can be changed into other materials. Chemistry is the study of matter, which is the stuff that everything around you is made of. Have you ever wondered why slime behaves the way it does? It all has to do with chemistry. Maybe you have noticed that some types of slime feel different than others. Slime is called a Non-Newtonian fluid because it’s a bit of both! Experiment with making the slime more or less viscous with varying amounts of foam beads.If you have ever played with slime, you know that it can be fun with all of its stretchy, bouncy, ickiness. > What is Slime? Read more about slime science here. As the slime forms, the tangled molecule strands are much like a clump of spaghetti! Picture the difference between wet spaghetti and leftover spaghetti the next day. They begin to tangle and mix until the substance is less like the liquid you started with and thicker and rubbery like slime! Slime is a polymer. You add the borate ions to the mixture, and it then starts to connect these long strands together. ![]() These molecules with flow past one another and keep the glue liquid. The glue is a polymer of long, repeating, and identical strands or molecules. How do you make slime? The borate ions in the slime activator (sodium borate, borax powder, or boric acid) mix with the PVA (polyvinyl acetate) glue and form this cool, stretchy substance. Mixtures, substances, polymers, cross-linking, states of matter, elasticity, and viscosity are just a few science concepts that can be explored with homemade slime! We always like to include a bit of homemade slime science around here! Slime is an excellent chemistry demonstration, and kids love it too!
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