One of Sesame Street’s most colorful residents finally answers the age-old question of whether a coconut floats in water, in his own unique style.
While most know Cookie Monster for his work as a fuzzy, blue gourmand, beneath that snack-obsessed exterior beats the heart of a scientist, and one that isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty – or his fingers wet for that matter – doing his own experiments.
In a recent series of YouTube videos – which are a few weeks old, but are charming and fun enough to be worth a mention all the same – Cookie, and his assistant Emma, asks viewers to help them determine which of the various objects they’ve collected will sink in water, and which will float.
Just watching Cookie drop things in water would be entertaining enough, but the icing in the cake – or indeed, the chocolate chips in the cookie – is that fact that the videos are interactive, allowing the viewer to choose the object, and then decide whether they think it will float or sink. It’s not the most complicated experiment in the world, but some of the objects might surprise you. I recommend that you try the citrus fruit first.
The videos don’t go into a lot of detail about why an object would float or sink, but they do a very good job of explaining the process of conducting an experiment. First, you ask a question, then you construct a hypothesis to answer that question, and then you test your hypothesis. If your hypothesis is correct, you’ve answered the question, and if it’s wrong, you adjust your hypothesis and try the experiment again.
As our very own Susan Arendt noted, interactive web videos, especially on something like YouTube, is a great way to keep Cookie Monster and the other Sesame Street characters current. Not only that, but by making the experiment accessible and fun to watch – and it really, really is – it helps keep the lesson memorable.
Published: Jan 17, 2011 06:47 pm