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? |
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Research Question | What do we want to test or study? How did we come up with the question(s). How does the question fit what we know about the topic? |
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 |
Updates
Looks like you are in the final stages of your projects
It’s great to see that teams from your school are wrapping up and posting conclusions. Enjoy the final stages of your project, and feel free to post any final comments or questions you have for your mentors.
Farewell and Best Wishes
As this research project is now in the final stages of wrapping-up, we wish to thank everyone who participated in this inquiry; the students, mentors, teachers and others behind the scenes. We appreciate all of your efforts and contributions to this online learning community.
Scientific exploration is a process of discovery that can be fun! There are many unanswered questions about plants just waiting for new scientists to consider, investigate, and share.
Please come back and visit the PlantingScience Research Gallery Archive anytime (Found under Community>Projects) to view this project in the future. You can search the Archive by key word, team name, topic, or school name.
Good bye for now.
Warm regards,
The PlantingScience team
Maybe next time I will just plant with soil instead of sand. Sand seems a lot complicated in my part.
That's great you are learning about how plants accumulate mass. Carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air is incorporated into the plant over time via photosynthesis and sugar storage!
Have you learned anything else? Have you come up with any conclusions for your experiment?
Yes, the water would help with the sand, definitely, because sand dries out faster than soil due to the particle size. What else would you do differently (remember what I said about varying too many things at once!).
I think we should try and water them more Frequently. While starting the project we did not water the plants until we were told by the teacher we should be watering them each every other day.
Okay, so we've figured out that you have varied two variables instead of just one in your experiment. You have varied soil type and light. If you were to do it again, what would you do differently?
Sorry, my response about the plants were confusing and I messed up. Unfortunaley we didn't do light and no light with the same variable (Soil).
Ok, thanks Lamah!
So, does everyone understand why it is difficult to figure out if light is the culprit or soil is the culprit for why the plant isn't growing?
So it sounds like you're having trouble figuring out why your plant in the light is not growing.
I'm still trying to visualize your experiment. Do you have 2 pots, 1 with sand and light and 1 with soil and no light, or do you have 4 pots--2 with sand, 1 with light and 1 without light, and 2 with soil, 1 with light and 1 without light?
If you only have the two pots this is a problem because you can't say whether the soil or the light is causing the difference in growth. From what we know about plants though, they should grow if given light, water, and nutrients. If they are not growing in the light and are in sand it might be that there isn't enough water for the seeds to germinate. Sand does not hold on to water very well because it has really big pore spaces between the sand particles.
Here's a video illustrating that:
Actually the plants that are receivieng light are not growing surprisingly, but the plants that are taking in light and water are not growing. They both have something different, the plants that are growing hase soil as the base and the ones that are not growing have sand as the bass. Maybe theres something there that's a problem with growing.
The plant that is growing without light is green at the tip and the rest of the stem is white. we have to stems right now and they are pretty long.
the plant in the dirt seems to be growing but the plant in the sand seems not to be growing
What do the plants look like that are growing without light? Are they green? Do they look the same as the plants growing in light?
I don't think this project relates back to plants. I'm not sure I may have to ask. Were only talking about the fish that migrate, because where going on a fieldtrip to a place where we are going to catch fish. Then we are going to have to study them.
We are still only seeing growth in cup 1 (the dirt cup)
Even without the light reaching the cup?
Yes, we are currently doing a new experiment. We have to choose a type of fish that was given to us during watching a slide show. I have gotten the smelt fish, we now have to draw our fish and explain where it lives and where it migrates.
That's neat! How is your teacher relating this back to plants? Are you talking about fish habitat at all?
Sounds like you all played a really fun game! Do you have any more information to share about your experiment?
Thanks Danielle and yes it did help, I have a better understanding of it now! Right now we just played a fish game, where you roll a dice and the fish moves whatever the dice rolls on. We start out with 100,000 fish and if we hit a danger spot, we lose fish due to things like weather, toxic waste, fisher man, etc. We have travel threw many different places until we reach the ending, which is the ocean.
we are playing a game abouts plants,yeah Funnnnn
What game did you play?
We planted are seeds and we are now seeing growth. In cup 1 we have dirt and we added water. However we blocked out all the light. In cup 2 we put our seeds in sand and we added water and we did not block out the light. There is only growth in cup 1.
Destiny,
Why are you using sand in one cup and soil in the other? If you want to test the effect of light alone, the only thing you should change between the two cups is light. So you would have everything set up exactly the same (same soil, same water amount, same seeds), then block only the sun from one cup.
We do this in science because we need something to compare the thing we're changing to. Without a light cup to compare the no-light cup to we wouldn't know what was supposed to happen in the absence of light.
If you wanted to test sand versus soil, you would do the exact same thing. You would keep everything the same except for what you wanted to test. In this case you would have same light, same water, and same seeds then only vary what you put the seeds in.
Does this make sense?
Danielle
I think that is because water has mostly all the mineral nutrients needed for a seed to grow. So the dish only with water has one growing source making it faster to grow. The other dish that grows with light and water needs 2 sources to grow. I am not 100% confidence about my answer, maybe it makes sense to you?
Hi Jairo,
When we think about plant growth we need to consider how plant use and store energy. Just like you get energy from the food you eat, plants also get energy from food--but food that they make.
Plants do photosynthesis, which creates sugars (carbohydrates) from nutrients and sunlight. Pure water doesn't have any nutrients in it, but water in the soil does because all of the nutrients found in the soil (Calcium, Magnesium, and Potassium, for example) dissolve in the water. The plant then takes up the water and the nutrients together, and transports them around the plant. During photosynthesis there are two different types of reactions that occur--light dependent reactions that occur only when the plant gets light, and light independent reactions that occur all the time regardless of whether light is present.
When plants grow it is because they are using the sugars they made from the light and the nutrients they obtained. Without light they can't complete photosynthesis, and therefore can't make any sugars (food) to eat.
Plants that germinate with water alone are using energy that's already stored in their seed. That energy is also sugar, but it came from the mother plant. She gave the seeds a little bit of food for their journey, but only enough to get them started in the soil when they have no light. If those plants don't get any light after they germinate, they'll run out of food and won't grow anymore. Eventually they die from lack of sunlight.
Does that help?
Danielle
Why do you think that is, Jairo?
For dry seeds
Dish 1 H20 and light is 0.19g
Dish 2 H20 and no light 0.45g
Dish 3 No H20 but light 0.11g
Sounds like you are starting to get results! Looking forward to hearing what happened. :)
I just put some of the seeds onto a napkin and where waiting for our teacher to tell us whats next then I dried them
Our plants are starting to grow! We are going to weigh them soon. What I have learned about the DNA is there were more than 1000 DNA molecules just so we can see a little piece of something that looked like spider web.
Any movement on your seeds yet?
Sounds like you all had a good time getting banana DNA. What did you learn about DNA from the DNA lab?
I think the one with the water and light would sprout because the heat will evaporate the water and make it most in the cup
Hello Danielle, today we have done another lab. We took a cut piece of banana and put extraction buffer in it and mixed them both up. We then put the smashed banana into a cynlinder. Then we took ethanol and mixed it with the smashed up banana liquid which then the DNA started to appear. Overall it was a fun lab and I enjoyed seeing the DNA.
Thanks for all the updates! What do you all think will happen to the different dishes? Which one do you think will have the most sprouts?
In my opinion the dish 1 with no sunlight will not grow due to no vitamin D or nutrients. Dish 2 with sunlight and water will grow overtime. Dish 3 the one without water will most likely not grow in my opinion.
Jairo,
Plants actually don't need vitamin D like people do. They do need some of the same nutrients we need though, like calcium and potassium. The nutrients most important to plant growth are called macronutrients and include things like calcium, magnesium, and potassium.
I think you are right in saying that the one with water and light will grow over time. Remember when you're making your predictions that with water you might get some sprouting because of the stored energy in the seed from the mother plant. The thing that will be missing from those seeds is further growth, which you should see in the light and water seeds.