Planting Science - Projects: Power Plant Girlz
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Power Plant Girlz

Project by group hhedoshingleonfall2016project


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 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

This team did a really great job of responding to my comments about developing specific hypotheses for how different colors of light would affect photosynethesis. I think that they learned a lot about how the light spectrum works, which I think is a challenging topic to wrap your head around....

Updates

Get to know your team’s scientist mentor, who will encourage and guide you through the scientific process of discovery. The more you share your ideas and research info, the more your mentor can help. You may also hear from a scientist mentor liaison who will be helping all the teams in your class.
PlantingScience Staff
updated the project info
PlantingScience Staff
updated the project info
PlantingScience Staff
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Hannah
said

Hey Kate! This will be our final time we will be responding to you. We just wanted to thank you for all the ideas and revisions you have given us! We really appreciate everything you've done for us and were so glad we had you as our mentor! Sincerely, the power plant girlz.

Kate Eisen
said

Hi team!

I really like the updates you made to your final presentation. I think your ideas for a next experiment would be interesting, and I'm especially impressed with how you've related what you've been learning about to solar panels! This technology is something that people are very interested in, and I hadn't really thought before about the color of solar panels and how making them even darker could increase the efficiency of light capture.

Great job this semester! I hope that you all stay curious about science and keep doing your own experiments. Let me know if you have any last questions about the project or my work.

Kate

Hannah
said

Here is out final project!

 

Hannah
uploaded Science project-3.pptx in project files
Kate Eisen
said

Hi team! Thanks for uploading your final presentation. I am really impressed with how you presented your results! It seems like you learned a lot about the light spectrum and how photosynthesis works, which is great!

One thing I thought was interesting was the similarities and differences in the patterns you saw during the first and second times you did the experiment. It looks like during the first time, when you used the colored sheets, you got more photosynthesis in all of the colors, whereas when you used food coloring, the pattern was the same (clear/red had more photosynthesis than green/blue) but the green and blue cups had much less photosynthesis compared to when you used the plastic sheets. Any ideas why this might be the case? Just curious what you think.

Also, one more question I have for you is: if you had the chance to do another experiment on this topic, what would you try next?

Looking forward to hearing your ideas,

Kate

Hannah
uploaded Science project.pptx in project files
Kate Eisen
said

Hi team! It sounds like you got some interesting results today! When you get a chance, it would be great to see either the raw data you collected and/or a graph of the data, because I'm curious about the exact differences between the different colors.

I'm looking forward to hearing about how it goes on Monday as well! Keep up the great work, planting scientists!

Kate

Gabby
said

We finished our first experiment with red floating the fastest, plain light in 2nd, green light in 3rd, and blue last. We will do our food coloring experiment Monday, hoping for the same results! 

Kate Eisen
said

Hi team,

Your updates to the protocol look great! Let me know what you think about what may happen with the different colors of light.

This video might give you some helpful information about different colors of light:

 

http://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/lsps07.sci.phys.energy.lightpigment/primary-colors-of-light-and-pigments/

I hope your first day of investigations goes well!

Kate

Hannah
uploaded Photosynthesis lab revised.pdf in project files
Hannah
said

I think we plan on using red, green, blue, and plain light. We will for sure measure out our baking soda! We will think about a hypothesis and get back to you on that. I will see if we can add a colored lightbulb to our experiment, thats a good idea! We will be performing our experiments tomorrow so we may not have the light bulbs but we may have it for day two. Thank you so much for your suggestions!

Kate Eisen
said

Hi again,

I saw that you uploaded a protocol for your experiment. I think overall it looks really good. I have two questions for you:

  1. Have you decided what colors you're going to use for the color sheets and the food coloring? I'm curious if you can come up with hypotheses about why you would expect different rates of photosynthesis in the different colors.
  2. I'm not sure if this is possible in your classroom, but have you thought about trying out different light bulbs as another way of getting colored light? For instance, I think it's possible to buy black light bulbs and red light bulbs? I'm not sure if that would give you a different result relative to using colored sheets or food coloring--what do you think?

One suggestion I have about your experimental design is that if you are able to weigh the baking soda, that might help make your results more consistent across the treatments.

Looking forward to hearing what you are thinking! Keep up the good work.

 

 

Hannah
uploaded photosynthesis.pdf in project files
Kate Eisen
said

Hi team,

It's exciting that this is your week to run an experiment. You're asking lots of good questions about photosynthesis. Here are a couple of things to think about:

What do we know about different types of light? For instance, what varies between red light and UV light? In thinking about those differences, can you make hypotheses about what types of light will be the best for photosynthesis?

It's super interesting to think about where photosynthesis can/can't take place in a plant. From what you've learned about photosynthesis so far, do you have ideas about whether it can happen in the roots? If you wanted to test that, would you make "leaf disks" out of the roots and compare them to actual leaves, or do you have other ideas about how to test this idea?

Lastly, it's also neat to think about how long plants can survive without light? Do you have any guesses about that? Since a lot of plants grow fairly slowly, I think they might be able to survive in the dark for awhile, or at least, it might be hard to test this during the span of your research projects in class. What do you think?

 

I'm looking forward to seeing what you decide to investigate in your experiment. Let me know if you have more questions as you think about what you might test and why you want to test it.

Kate

Hannah
said

Here are some questions we have for our experiment we will conduct. Can photosynthesis take place in different types of light? (red light, uv etc) Can photosynthesis take place in the roots? (without leaves). How long does the plant need light to provide for for itself during the hours with no light? We are considering conducting this experiment. Can photosynthesis take place in different types of light? 

PlantingScience Staff
joined the project
Mikaela
said

we will be taking to you a lot next week designing our experiment! So far we have done a lab to prove that carbon is needed for photosynthesis, also testing do plants undergo cellular respiration! we look forward to asking you question's!

Hannah
said

That is so fascinating to here what you do with flowers, it sound like a really fun subjects to study! We haven't started on the sun activities yet but when we do we will be sure to ask you any questions we have!

Kate Eisen
said

Hi team!

It's really great to meet all of you! My name is Kate and I am PhD student at Cornell University, which is in upstate New York. I am really fascinated by flowers--it's so cool to me how flowers can be lots of different shapes, sizes, and colors. I'm interested in how these types of flowers have evolved, and how the evolution of flowers might be different in places where a number of plant species share pollinators. I study these questions in California, where there are a lot of native wildflowers, so I get to travel a lot for my work!

Right now, I'm processing the results of a big experiment I did this summer. I wanted to see the timing of when plants flower (like early summer vs. late summer) affects how many pollinators visit them and how many seeds they make. So, I used potted plants to experimentally change the flowering time of my plants. What I've found so far is that the plants that flowered earlier than they do in nature actually produced a lot more seeds than the ones that flowered at the normal time. This is totally not the breakthrough I was looking for, but, it can be exciting when an experiment gives you an unexpected result! Now I will spend a lot of time thinking about what might be happening with these plants and pollinators that might have caused this result.

Thanks for telling me about what you do when you're not in class. I hope those of you in fall sports are having good seasons so far! When I'm not working on my research, I like going to the gym or going to yoga classes, and I also really enjoy cooking and baking. Sometimes I make my own ice cream!

I know that you just got online for the first time--have you started any of the power of sunlight activities yet? I'm looking forward to hearing more about what you're doing soon, and feel free to ask me any questions at any point.

 

-Kate

Mikaela
said

Hi our names are Hannah, Gabby, and Mikaela! We are all in biology this year. We all play sports during the school year such as cheer, soccer, and basketball. Something we like about science is doing experiments on the topic were learning! One question we have for you is what are some breakthroughs in science you might be coming upon?

Mikaela
updated the project info
Mikaela
replaced project picture

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