The Tasty Age

Grade:

4

Teacher:

Maura Baker

Does the intensity of your taste buds change when you get older? We tasted five cups of water flavored with the five flavors: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savory and rated the intensity of the taste from 0-8. We added descriptive words for each flavor. Then we took the same exact flavors home and had our parents taste them and rate the intensity from 0-8 and write a descriptive word. Then we graphed our findings. We discovered that both kids and adults experienced the same intensity for most of the flavors except for sour. With sour flavors the kids tasted double the intensity of adults. Adults also had all positive descriptions for sour flavors and kids had one third negative descriptions. We think this information could be applied to people who make soda or candy or even flavors for things you don't want kids to eat. We're going to do a follow up experiment just tasting a range of sour flavors with kids and adults.

Project presentation