Mighty Hamster Maze

By: Laura and Courtney

The topic that we chose to do for KIC was about hamsters and is called the “Mighty Hamster Maze”. We chose this topic because we were interested in learning which kind of hamsters, teddy bear or shorthaired have a better sense of smell.

The question we mainly wanted to answer was: “Which type of hamster, between teddy bear and shorthaired hamsters, have a better sense of smell?”

The background information that we did was looking in books and we found out that, “Hamsters feel with their whiskers.” They also gave us the information that, “Hamsters like to explore.” So, a maze was good for hamsters. We read an old KIC journal that was about gerbils and found out that a hamster or gerbils would do anything to get to its favorite food, which are apples.

First we made a maze of wood. Next we tested 1 teddy bear hamster and 1 shorthaired. Later we wrote down the data we got from timing the hamsters with a stopwatch. Finally, we found out that the Teddy bears have a better sense of smell than the shorthaired hamsters.

We got facts that teddy bear hamsters have a better sense of smell than the shorthaired hamsters. We learned that the teddy bear hamsters can race through a maze faster than shorthaired hamsters to get the reward at the end. One last thing we learned was that even though teddy bears are slow, they use their nose and although shorthaired hamsters are fast, they don’t use their nose and LOVE to explore.

Students may try to build a maze and have the question, “How fast do hamsters run through a maze that has rewards at the end?” We wanted to try only the topic we chose. You may want to try the question above.

We had fun doing this experiment. We highly recommend this experiment to anyone who is good at math and is patient. Even if you are not, you may have fun anyway.