A couple of week ago my daughter and I attempted to make a homemade lava lamp. The basic idea here is to fill a two liter bottle with a 50/50 mix of water and vegetable oil. Put in several drops of food coloring. Then drop a tablet (or 1/2 tablet, you can experiment) of Alka-Seltzer into the mixture. The tablet creates carbon dioxide bubbles that cause water and food color to rise. As you can see below, this did not work very well for us.
A few of the food coloring drops rise and fall, but nothing that I would describe as lava lamp like. I realized later that I put the water in first and then the oil. The food coloring drops didn't have much of a chance to drop and dissolve into the water before I dropped in the Alka-Seltzer tablet. At the time I didn't want to waste another half bottle of oil, so I let it be. We may have to revisit this experiment in the future. My daughter still thought it was cool. You can hear her excited voice say "It exploded!"
Give this one a try. Your goal is to a better job than we did!
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