So Dan Meyer posted a fun video http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=9553 where you had a glass of Coke and a glass of Sprite and then he took an eye dropper of Sprite and put it in the Coke, then took an eye dropper from the Coke glass and put it back into the Sprite glass. Then he asked "which glass contains more of the original soda". I made two attempts to model this problem in Etoys.

So I decided to try and figure a way to let kids model this problem in Etoys. My first attempt used kedamahttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10579 to show the "soda molecules" moving around and let the kids move the soda into the eye dropper and then into the coke glass and back.

Then decided on using a simpler approachhttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10581using a set of 10 Sprite boxes in a container and 10 Coke boxes in a container. And asked the kids to move the 2 Sprite boxes into the Coke container, then shuffle the Coke container and take the top four boxes and move them back to the Sprite container. And have them do this a few times and think about how this relates to the Coke v Sprite problem.

I also created a Blog Post with some videos herehttp://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2011/03/coke-v-sprite-have-kids-build-model-of.html .

What to you think? How can we use this problem to help kids learn?

Stephen