Info
| Explore |
Work on this next! What do we know about plants from our experiences outside of school? What have we discovered in class and background research? What questions about plants interest us? |
|---|---|
| Research Question | -Does the density of the spores influence germination rate? -Does the density of the spores influence the hermaphrodite to male ratio? |
| Predictions | What are the possible outcomes of our study given the variables we are working with? What is our explanation for why and how we think this will happen? |
| Experimental Design | What is our plan? Be sure to include enough detail that another group can replicate our experiment. What variables will we test? What variables will we measure and observe? What variables will we keep constant? How will we record our data? |
| Conclusion | What claim can we make from our experiment? What are possible explanations for our results? How do the data we collected and our reasoning with scientific ideas support our claim? What future experiments could be done to expand on the results of this experiment? |
| About this Project |
Though the Spring 2020 session was cut short for the Forest Rascals, this team had a strong beginning and I'm sure would've completed their project on the same note. They were highly motivated and interested by the C-Fern investigation theme. By brainstorming new experimental design options to... |
Updates
Hey! We communicated with our teacher about using a hemacytometer to count how many spores there are as well as using a smaller amount of water and more dishes. Unfortunately, we don't have those resources. However, we will present our information collected today in another message.
Hello Gwen!
Thanks for the update. It sounds like you are able to quantify spores per droplet pretty reliably and you can always create a makeshift hemocytometer with gridded paper under your petri dishes...I'm sure you will come up with creative, repeatable methods to obtain good data for your project. I look forward to hearing more about your experimental set-up and gametophyte growth as your project progresses!
Hi team,
Your experimental design looks good! I know you're not sure about spore #s yet, but do you have any estimates about what you might expect per treatment? Also, would you be able to use a hemacytometer to count how many spores per drop there are? A hemocytometer is just a gridded slide to use with a compound microscope to count cells (or in this case spores).
Also, 10mL increments may be a little much, especially depending on how many spores you will have in solution. It may be more appropriate to dilute by 2mL or 5mL per treatment. Also, do you think it would be possible to do one or two more replicates per treatment? If you can only use 4 dishes for your experiment, that's fine, but if you could use 12 (3 replicates per treatment) then you would have much more statistical power and stronger results if you end up seeing similar patterns for all replicates of each treatment.
Your hypotheses about what you may see sound reasonable and well thought-out. I look forward to seeing photos of your experiment once you get it set up!
our experiment set up below
Our hypothesis-
We expect the male population to increase as there is more room for males to avoid females.
We expect the germination rate to increase with the more room for spores
We will analyze our spores under a microscope as we will be able to determine the male to female ratio as well as germination rate under a microscope.
I think we are going to use 4 dishes to do our experiment with one of those dishes being our control. We were thinking about also doing our dilutions in increments of 10 mL
We created a diagram of our experiment however it is not allowing us to paste or save it.- nevermind, we figured it out
Can you please clarify what an independent and dependent variable so we can apply it to our experiment of serial dilution?
Hi Katie,
I think the best way to remember the difference between independent and dependent variables is to think of the independent variable as the manipulated variable and the dependent variable as the response variable. For example, if you wanted to test how salinity affects plant growth then your saline concentrations would be your manipulated variable and your measurements of plant height and leaf length would be your response variables.
Hope that's helpful, and let me know if I can clarify anything else.
Finally, what substrate do you plan to grow your ferns on and how many serial dilutions would you use? What dilutions would you like to test?
So, we are thinking we want to the serial dillution to acess the competition among spores assosiated with growth rates. We think that we have the most correct materials for this experiment.
Gwen,
Those sound like great questions to test. So, you will be inoculating plates with different spore dilutions and then you plan to collect data on how many spores become gametophytes as well as whether gametophytes are hermaphrodites or males?
Also, how many dilution treatments and many replications for each dilution treatment do you plan to use?
Hey Forest Rascals,
I love your enthusiasm and you made great progress today on your scientific thinking related to the Cfern experiment. I do, however, suggest that you up your game related to being scholarly for the Engage part of your experiment project page. Remember, you are representing Central High School and I know how amazingly fantastic you all are so let's have your work reflect that :)