Which Material Insulates the Best?

by Emily Schulman
Alexandria, Virginia

Introduction
    For my fifth grade science fair project I found out how well newspaper, bubble wrap, and cardboard insulated cups of ice.

Materials and Methods
    I got twelve plastic cups and filled them each with ¼ cup of water and then put them in the freezer overnight. The next day I took them out of the freezer and I put nine of them in boxes (three in cardboard-lined boxes, three in bubble wrap-lined boxes, and three in newspaper-lined boxes). The other three were controls. That means they weren't in boxes. I set a timer that would go off in two hours. After the timer went off, I took the cups and poured out the water and then put the cups on the scale and weighed them. Then I put the cups back in their places for another hour and did the same thing that I did before. This is what my experiment looked like:

    After three hours, the average weight of the control cups was 27 grams. The average for the bubble wrap was 22 grams. The average for the cardboard was 34 grams. The average for the newspaper was 37 grams. Here's a graph of the grams of ice that melted during my experiment:

Weird Things I Noticed
    The cardboard 2 sample was just below the 40 gram mark after two hours and the other two samples were between 45 and 50 grams.
    The bubble wrap sample 2 had a very sharp decline in grams between two and three hours. Even the controls didn't have such a sharp decline.
    Control 2 barely melted between two hours and three hours.
    Why is it always sample 2 that's weird???

Conclusion
    My question was which material insulates the best. I found out that newspaper insulated the best. I also found out that it's not a good idea to let your Dad help too much with writing up your science fair project.

You can also read my Dad's version of this.