Hi Team! Wow, it is so cool to see the outcome of your hard work on what was a really neat experiment! I am especially excited to see that your treatment had a clear effect! You are right to conclude that the results did not match your hypothesis (that is, that the celery did not return to conditions pre treatment), but...it is so so neat that in both treatments you saw changes in the celery conditions in the direction you predicted (that is, you saw an increase in mass when the celery was placed in normal water, and a decrease in mass when placed in the salt water). So, my question to you: why is it that the celery did not return to its initial conditions? Do you think, if you would have left it longer (and there was no issue of bacterial growth!) in the normal water in the second phase of the experiment, the celery would have eventually reached it's starting mass? Or, perhaps did the 24 hours in the salt water change something about the celery, making it impossible for it to return to its starting conditions?

I really like the poster design! It is clear and easy to follow, and you used figures in a way to be informative and eye catching. I especially love the diagrams showing your experimental design, and the procedure. This was really helpful for me to be able to follow your question, and how you went about answering it using your experiment. And I loved to see the actual photos of the experimental celery!!!

I have a couple of suggestions, if you have time to make a few changes. First, when you are using figures that aren't necessarily your own (for example, the figure you included demonstrating osmosis) it is a good idea to provide a reference for the figure. For example, did you all find that figure from your textbook? Or, perhaps from Google? If from a text book, use the name of the text book as the reference, if it is a figure from the internet, you can use the website address. For the pictures of the celery, be sure to give the photographer credit! For example, you can add a small line of text under the figure that says: "Photo credit Mason" or whomever took the photos!

Second, I think I know why you used both the full celery stalks, and the pieces, but I am not sure that it was explained in your procedure. Be sure to let your audience know what your thoughts were, including both the celery stalks and cut celery!

Third, looking at your results section, I was a little confused by the "Position" column in your tables. Is it possible that some of the columns in these tables need to be updated?

Again, really great job pulling this together! I especially appreciated your persistence, given the many problems that you encountered! And you all did an excellent job learning from these problems, and using what you learned from them to update your experimental design. This is something that is SO SO important in science, but is often difficult to deal with. RARELY do things go as we expect the first, second, or even tenth time we try an experiment!

Hi Shaurya and Team!

I'm sorry to hear that your experiment suffered from contamination - even with lots of care and precautions, this can happen. Our lab group just had to stop two large experiments because the plants we had growing in the greenhouses got attacked by a root fungus!

I think your idea to limit the time of each of the treatments is a good one. If you are to see an effect of your treatment, you should see it within a 24-hour period. Good luck!!!

Hi Brent and Nick,

Sounds like you are well on your mission to make the curliest celery possible! Will you only have one treatment level, and if so, what will the salt concentration be? That is, are you comparing only one salt treatment to your control (no salt) treatment? Or will you try different amounts of salt? Also, how are you measuring "curly"? Is there a quantitative measure you are using, to measure this? Or, are you using a scale (e.g. 1-5 with 1 being super strait, and 5 being like curly french fry?).

Excited to see how it goes! Good luck!