Sink The Boat Valentines Challenge

Our Valentine’s Day sink the boat challenge is always a favorite and is so easy to change up with seasons, holidays, and special days. It is a fun twist on the classic penny boat challenge! Explore Valentines Day STEM with candy hearts, and learn about the concept of buoyancy with an easy to set up STEM activity with two variations for younger, and older kids!

Explore STEM For Valentine’s Day

Open-ended STEM activities like this sink the boat challenge are perfect for kids who love to design, build, and test new inventions! Encourage your young engineer with easy STEM challenges perfect for the season.

How many candy hearts does it take to sink the boat? What happens to the candy hearts that fall into the water? This Valentine’s Day challenge is the best last-minute activity you will always have time to do. Easy and no fuss!

I always like to put together a STEM supplies kit for each season or holiday. This season of course we have a Valentine’s Day kit filled with fun but inexpensive supplies to go along with our Valentine STEM activities.

TIP: Head to the dollar store and look around the house for supplies! STEM can be fun, simple, and frugal!

This fun Valentine theme engineering activity is the perfect way to fit in a fun afternoon activity and a little hands-on learning. I love how learning opportunities can present themselves in so many ways.

You can easily use this Valentine’s Day STEM challenge at home, in the classroom, or with a youth group for an awesome holiday activity. Also keep in mind that it’s perfect for individuals, 2 person teams, or small groups to work on together!

Use The Engineering Design Process

This season, why not pair the engineering design process with fun holiday themes including candy hearts!

Engineers often follow a design process. There are many different design processes that all engineers use but each one includes the same basic steps to identify and solve problems.

An example of the process is “ask, imagine, plan, create, and improve”. This process is flexible and maybe completed in any order.

Remember, it’s ok to not get it right the first time. Good ideas take tweaking, designing and re-designing, testing and re-testing to get it right. Often it’s from our failures that we find success. STEM provides incredibly valuable life lessons for kids!

Read more about the Engineering Design Process and grab the free information guide.

Helpful STEM Resources To Get You Started

Here are a few resources that will help you introduce STEM activities and challenges more effectively to your kiddos or students and feel confident yourself when presenting materials.

You’ll find tons of free printables, templates, and journal sheets throughout all of our activities or join us in the Library Club for instant access all year long!

Free Printable Valentine STEM Calendar

Sink The Boat Valentine’s Day Challenge

You can check our our original penny boat STEM challenge here!

Supplies:

Candy Conversation hearts
mini heart containers {or whatever you have will work} or tin foil
a bucket or bowl with water! So easy!

TIP: Make sure your empty containers float easily.

Set Up #1: Using Containers

STEP 1: Add a drop of red food coloring (optional) to your bowl and fill 3/4 with water. Add the empty container to the bowl of water.

STEP 2: Start filling the container one heart at a time. Encourage your child to count as he fills up his heart. You can even keep track on paper how many hearts it takes to fill up each “boat” before it sinks.

Our Results: We found out that it was a different amount each time depending on the placement of the candy hearts. We tested what would happen if we filled just one part of the “boat” making it uneven. The “boat” sank faster! He thought this was pretty neat. We explored concepts like balanced and unbalanced, even and uneven, and sink and float! Great math and science ideas for young kids to learn about.

Heart Candy Sink the boat Valentine's science play

Set Up #2: Design A Tin Foil Boat

STEP 1: Cut two 8″ squares of aluminum foil for each boat. Then form a small boat from the aluminum foil. Time for kids to use their engineering skills!

STEP 2: Place your boat in the water and see if it floats. Reshape if it doesn’t! Then slowly add the candy hearts one at a time. How many candy hearts can you count before it sinks?

Heart Sink The Boat Valentines Science sensory activity

How Does It Work?

This sink the boat challenge involving a tin foil boat and candy hearts is an experiment that explores the principles of buoyancy. Buoyancy is the upward force exerted by a fluid (such as water) that opposes the weight of an object placed in it.

Whether the tin foil boat sinks or floats depends on the overall density of the boat. Density is the mass of an object per unit volume. If the density of the boat is less than the density of water, it will float; if it’s greater, it will sink.

When you fill the tin foil boat with candy hearts, you are adding mass to the boat. If the added mass increases the overall density of the boat and makes it greater than the density of water, the boat will sink.

On the other hand, if the added mass doesn’t significantly increase the overall density or even decreases it, the boat will remain buoyant and float.

The shape and design of the tin foil boat also play a role. Distributing the candy hearts evenly or concentrating them in specific areas can affect the boat’s stability and its ability to float.

Extend the learning with this easy sink or float experiment using items from your kitchen!

Explore Dissolving Candy

We also observed something neat happening once our boats hand completely sunk, the candies started to dissolve!

We left our candy heart sink the boat activity out on the table to see what would happen over time. He said the candy hearts would disappear. A couple hours later, after a swim lesson, this is what we found.

What was left of the hearts were floating and most had dissolved quite a bit. He tried to pick one up and it just squished in his finger tips.

Check out our dissolving candy heart experiment!

More Fun Valentine STEM Activities

Printable Valentine STEM Project Pack

Countdown to Valentine’s Day with science and STEM! Pack includes complete instructions, templates, and images for 20+ activities. Bonus: printable science Valentine’s Day cards!