Science Projects for Sixth Grade: Pill Digestion

Teach:

Ask students if they ever wondered how vitamins or medicine are broken down (digested) in a person's stomach. Ask students if they know how long swelled items usually stay in the stomach to be broken down. If the students do not know you can tell them food is digested in your stomach over a period of thirty minutes. Let the students know that over the next half an hour they are going to experiment and watch how well some vitamins and pills break down in a person's stomach.

Materials:

1. 6 different pills or vitamins
2. Vinegar
3. 6 cups
4. Thermometer
5. Microwave
6. Notebooks
7. Pencil

Procedure:

1. Use one

   cup for each pill or vitamin. Use a multi-vitamin, an aspirin, a cold pill, etc. Label the cup with the pill that will be placed inside of it. You should get at least six student volunteers to help you with this.

2. Have the students write out a hypothesis in their notebooks before you go any farther. They should list what they think will happen to each pill.
3. Place some vinegar in a microwave safe bowl and microwave the vinegar until it reaches a temperature of 98.6 degrees. This is the temperature inside a person's body. Ask (teach) the students why we would use vinegar as a medium. Explain that stomach contents are acidic, and that is what aides in digestion.
4. Pour the vinegar (at body temperature) into each cup. Make sure you use the same amount of vinegar in each cup to be sure the experiment is fair.
5. Place the pill inside the designated cup.
6. Start a timer and allow each pill or vitamin to remain in the vinegar for thirty minutes.
7. Remove any left over pills from the vinegar when the stop watch reads thirty minutes.

Review:

What happened to each pill? Where there any pills or vitamins that completely dissolved? Where there any that didn't dissolve at all? Have students discuss whether their hypothesis were correct or incorrect and why. Then have the students record the conclusion to the experiment in their notebooks.

Note- be sure not to use time released vitamin pills.