Exploding Pumpkin - Halloween Science Experiments

Hey welcome back to Be All Science and we're about to celebrate one of my favorite holidays as a science teacher and that's Halloween. That's why I've got my pumpkin here. Now I've taken the liberty of already carving this pumpkin out or at least cleaning it out and I'm going to show you how to make this pumpkin carve itself using science. I call this demonstration a self-carving pumpkin but really a pumpkin can't carve itself so you have to give it a little help ahead of time and make sure that the pieces are loose enough that they'll pop out easily but tight enough that can build up some pressure in there. Now you need to make a hole in the back. I'm using a screwdriver big enough to fit one of these large match lighters inside. Now if you've been following along on Be All Science you know that calcium carbide is one of my absolute favorite things to have around and it looks like little pebbles. If I put some of those in here and add a little water it's going to start to react and it's going to release acetylene gas. So here's some water, plain old water. I'll put it in here and it should start to bubble. All it takes is one gram of calcium carbide and 20 milliliters of water. Well here goes nothing. I've got my water and we're going to make this little pumpkin carve itself and in no time flat this pumpkin will become a jack-o'-lantern using science. Going in. 30. Go time. Here we go. In three, two, one. Crazy. It just popped its face right out of there. I love it. Now you can see why Halloween is the science teacher's favorite time of year. There we go. Self-carving pumpkin. We're ready for Halloween. Trick or treat. Now we're not done with this pumpkin. Let's take some good high quality hand sanitizer, the type that has a whole bunch of alcohol in it and smear it all over the face of this jack-o'-lantern and light it on fire. Isn't that a nice effect? Sorry little jack-o'-lantern. You can do like we like to do. A little 95% isopropyl alcohol. Just a little bit goes a long way. Let's set this down in the bottom. Light it up. And once we get our pumpkin shining nice and bright we can move on to the next thing. That's a fire breathing pumpkin. Now to get the pumpkin to breathe fire I use something called lycopodium and lycopodium is just a spore. It's actually a biological organism and what it does is it grabs oxygen and pulls it through the flame and it causes, well, a fireball. Yeah! Well hey guys thanks for watching. Again it doesn't get any better than this. Halloween, the greatest time of the year to be celebrating science and the thing is we've got all sorts of great stuff going on in here at Beals Science. Come and visit me at BealsScience.com or check out the stuff popping up wherever it is around the screen. Real thing here is remember to have fun but also keep on learning.