Exploding pumpkins

Safety first!  We exploded pumpkins today using elastic bands.  We made some measurements first, and put our safety glasses on, and started applying elastic bands.

We kept track of how many bands we added, and noticed that the pumpkins started to change shape.

We recorded our progress with our devices as it got close.  We wanted to catch the moment when it exploded.

The following are stills from one of the videos

You can see the moment

It was pretty exciting

At the end, we measured more things, including the wall thickness.

We removed all elastics and bagged up the pumpkins for donation to a farm and also a wildlife sanctuary.  We will be analyzing the data next week to look for trends and correlations.