Cooking together has got to be one of our favorite activities to do as a family. We almost never eat out anymore. As times have changed, we’ve learned to enjoy the process of preparing meals at home and learning how to do things the old-fashioned way. Another thing we’re looking for are quality fun things we can do that will enrich our lives rather than collecting things for the sake of collecting them. As a family we also do not believe that our children should have too much sugar and so we do our best to limit that as well to about one good treat per week. That means that this week we decided to try out Gross Gummy Candy Lab which you can find here.
Gross Gummy Candy Lab advertises itself as a STEM activity on the box and it likely does work as a STEM activity but so does cooking in general if applied correctly so the STEM designation here is likely more for marketing purposes than it is for education. The instructions are pretty easy to follow and also include a few other experiments to go along with just making the candy. One particularly cool experiment is the purple cabbage experiment it gives on page 14.
What items come in Gross Gummy Candy Lab?
The items include:
- Sour Mixture
- Seaweed Powder
- Mixed-berry Flavor
- Green-apple Flavor
- Plastic Gummy Mold Tray
- Plastic Storage Bag
- Sticker Sheet with Labels
Our Review:
This game is pretty fun and my kids got a kick out of the fact that we were using seaweed to make the gummy worms. The age requirement is for 6+ but I was able to make it fun for my 5 year old. Because this is an educational activity I found it was helpful to practice talking about what we would need before we started. I had my 5 year old be in charge of using the scissors and pulling the gummies out of the mold. My 13 year old was actually more of a challenge to keep engaged because he could have likely done the experiment by himself with only supervision. In hindsight I would have my done one of the flavors with my 5 year old only and then just hung out while my 13 year old did the other. As it was though everything worked out. My 13 year old took the gummies to school and ate them for lunch while my 5 year old have them to her teacher. Sounds about age appropriate to me!
Our Suggestions:
The directions are pretty straightforward except for when it talks about the mixture “foaming”. I found this phrasing to be a little ambiguous and would have been helped if I could have gotten a picture for what it looks like foaming.
If you have any skill with crafts or molds, you’ll have an easier time setting the molds than we did. It might have something to do with the foaminess level but we found it pretty difficult to get the mixture into the molds. With that being said, you can totally make two mixtures and combine flavors in order to make really cool and tasty treats. That level of finesse though is beyond us.
Use this as a teaching opportunity. I think I was able to teach my daughter pretty well with the material provided but could have done better with my son as was discussed above.
Check out the other experiments listed and give those a shot too. Some of them seem pretty cool.
This is a great opportunity to combine activities as well. If you are making cupcakes or pudding, bring out this game for an extra activity.
The actual preparation in total took about 20 minutes but the total time was about 3.5 hours due to needing to let the gummies harden and dry on a plate.
This is a pretty cheap way of getting some entertainment and even presents teaching opportunities for the kids. Please enjoy the video we made of our experience. We had a great time and I am sure that you will too.