Sounds good Allie! Do you have any photo of your plants or are you going to take any photo of the experiment soon? I'd like to see the baby radish plants. Good observations and my question to you at this stage of your experiment is what do you think the salt water do to the plant and soil conditions that cause it to not grow? A lack of oxygen in the salt water? Radish doesn't like salt water? Is there any plant that can take up salt water? Here are just thoughts for you and your group to think about. Overall great work and I am very glad to hear about all of your updates!

Hi Allie,

Great response and I hope you are very excited about your radish experiment. One advice I want to give you and your group is that when you select three radish seeds for your study, it might be better to choose more than three and prepare one or two more seeds to be used for each treatment as back up samples. Think about this: what if your only one seed for each treatment fails (poor germination, bad seed quality, or some other experimental error)? 

It is very common to use replications and multiple samples in natural science and health science experiments. Let me know if you have questions, and please let me know how much water are you adding to each of your experiment? And when do you add the water every day? What's your salt water's ratio of water to salt? What type of salt will you be using? Rock salt? Edible (table salt?)

I think you guys are on a good start, and keep thinking about questions and please feel free to share any question or thought with me as you move along with your experiment. 

Hi Rachel, Allie, and Katie,

I will be your group's mentor since we are short on mentors and while I am the mentor coordinator for our whole class, I am willing to step in and serve as your group's mentor too.

So I took a quick look at your slideshow and word doc, and I have a few questions for you:

1. What do you mean by light water vs dark water on slide #2? What do you think causes the light vs dark water? Anything to do with soil texture and how water get through the soil?

2. On your last slide, can you explain more about when the next experiment will take place? Is this something you plan to do next or just a prospective idea that you generated based on your current soil experiment? 

Other than that, I really like the template you chose for your slideshow and the pictures and descriptions you had about the soil experiment. I think you all did a good job on this experiment. It's just that when you get results such as the light vs dark water, try to think more beyond just the results. Conducting an experiment is not just about the results you observed, but to find out the reasoning behind it. Although it is not easy to just come up with the reason very easily, or you may found only a little bit of evidence towards the results, that's still very meaningful, and could be tested or verified again. 

Remember, an experiment or results can be repeated, but the reasoning behind the "why" could hold forever, or until a repeated experiment proves it differently. So it's very important to find out anything about the cause of the results based on your experiment.

I really like your radish experiment, because I think you have some very interesting ideas with looking at road salt vs runoff water. 

My question for your radish experiment is: when will you record your data? When do observations take place? I would recommend think of multiple time points as a plant grows continuously like humans, right? So you can set a few time points to take notes on what? Plant height? Plant growth (maybe the first open leaf?, first 10 cm growth, and then the second 10 cm growth)? And you may have other ideas too, so as you conduct an experiment, you need to think about the response variables carefully while you test your treatments.

Also, would you include a control in your study? Besides the runoff and road salt, don't you want to have clean water or something that's traditionally accepted? A control group will allow you to test if the observations you found in your treatments change because of your treatments or maybe there are other mistakes, issues with other factors (not treatment-related), so you can confirm that your findings are caused by your treatments, not by other other factors that's not really relevant to your objectives.