Chocolate and Egg

Class practical

The different effect of heat on chocolate and egg white provides a clear introduction to physical and chemical changes. This experiment could also be used to introduce students to the safe use of Bunsen burners.
 

Lesson organisation

A straightforward, if somewhat messy, class experiment in which students heat the two materials alongside each other in a water bath until the changes have taken place, followed by cooling. This should take no more than 30 minutes.

Health & Safety and Technical notes

Read our standard health & safety guidance

Wear eye protection. Do not taste foods in a laboratory. The food or the apparatus may be contaminated. Do not sit down while heating the beaker or handling the hot test-tubes.

The ‘no tasting’ rule should be strictly enforced.

Chocolate - cooking chocolate is the best type of chocolate for this experiment – other types melt too slowly. The chocolate should be grated and pre-loaded into a test-tube for each working group, sufficient to give about a 2 cm depth of molten chocolate when heated – this may require trials to establish the correct amount of grated chocolate.

Egg albumen - use eggs with the 'lion brand' stamp' as these should be salmonella free. The egg white needs to be separated from the yolks of sufficient eggs to provide enough for about 4 cm³ of egg white for each working group. The egg white should then be pre-loaded into a test-tube for each working group.

1 At the end of the lesson, the students can be asked to hand back their test-tubes with the contents still inside, as recovery and cleaning may cause less mess than leaving it to the students! The chocolate is best removed by re-melting and pouring out of the tubes.

Procedure

1 Add cold water to the beaker until it is about one-third full, and place it on the tripod and gauze.

2 Place a test-tube with egg white and a test-tube with chocolate in the beaker.

3 Heat the beaker of water with the test-tubes carefully until the water in the beaker boils. Allow the water to boil gently for about 5 minutes.

4 Watch what happens to the egg white and the chocolate in the tubes while they are being heated.

5 Turn off the Bunsen burner and use the test-tube holder to transfer the tubes to the rack to cool.

6 Watch what happens to the egg white and the chocolate in the tubes as they cool.

Teaching notes

This experiment is appropriate for classes at an early stage in their science education, so students are likely to be fairly inexperienced in the safe and skillful use of the Bunsen burner. This is therefore a good opportunity to develop their ability to use the Bunsen burner and emphasis safety points, such as standing up when doing experiments that involve heating.

The main purpose of the experiment is of course to introduce physical and chemical change, and the associated ideas of reversible and non-reversible changes. The chemical change in the egg white should take no more than 5 minutes once the water is boiling, and grated cooking chocolate should melt in about the same time. Many children will have met this in primary school.

On cooling, the chocolate will of course solidify to a solid mass, and students may be distracted by the change of form from the grated material at the start. If so, the technician could be asked to pre-melt the chocolate in the tubes and allow it to solidify again before the lesson, but note that it will then take longer for the chocolate to melt in the experiment.

Health & Safety checked May 2008

Weblinks

There are many websites, especially from North America, that provide a variety of approaches to teaching physical and chemical changes, but mainly for students older than those for whom this experiment is designed. These two examples seem to match a similar stage of student learning; the first includes a useful demonstration that could be used to reinforce the class experiment:

Saskatchewan schools

Teachers' domain

A discussion of the nature of the chemical changes involved in cooking eggs, suitable for teacher background information, can be found at:

Science of Cooking: The accidental scientist