Is Yeast Alive? A Fun Experiment For Your Kids
There are lots of ways to make science fun, and designing experiments to do at home is one of the best ways to bring science into everyday life, explaining how the things around us work.
Read on for a quick and easy experiment to try with yeast, which is particularly great if you have been baking or making bread as a family during lockdown! It is yeast that makes the bread dough rise by converting the sugar found in flour into carbon dioxide (CO2) and ethanol (alcohol), through anaerobic respiration.
This is the process of 'breathing' without the need for oxygen.
The below experiments set out to answer the question 'is yeast alive? ', as well as exploring what the perfect amount of sugar is to feed the yeast and how much carbon dioxide is produced.