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.

After the end of the session, we will be updating the platform and archiving groups and projects, after which time new updates/posts will not be able to be added to projects or groups. Please come back and visit the PlantingScience Project Gallery anytime to view this project in the future. You can search the Gallery by keyword, team name, topic, or school name.

Good bye for now.

Warm regards,

The PlantingScience Team

Hi team,

Thank you so much for your kind note. I also apologize for being unreliable with the Zoom connections--we have had some sickness at work this week and I have been dealing with this problem but I feel very fortunate to have worked with you this semester!  I wanted to make sure you knew how impressive I thought your work was on this project--I really enjoyed your photos and sketches that enhanced your work. You also demonstrated strong scientific thinking skills. I hope that you and all your friends and family are safe and happy as we move into this Thanksgiving season and that the rest of your semester goes smoothly.  Your team really stands out in terms of your diligence and creativity in your project!

Thank you Dr. Vrentas!

    We really appreciated working with you! All your advice was really helpful and we enjoyed it greatly. One of our favorite parts of our experiment was examining the celery and making observations. 

Thank you! -Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella) 

Hi team!

I understand you are coming to the end of your journey with your project, and I will be planning on attending for the presentation on Friday.

I went through your poster content again and I had a few quick notes related to your presentation--just some things to think about as you describe your results, extending from our discussion:

--Based on what we discussed about salt water, how might we be able to explain the celery getting flaccid in that condition?

--How might this experiment relate to the water the plant is taking up in the ground? (in other words, what might be in that water?)

Nice work everyone!  I hope these comments will help you to clarify things.  Good luck on your presentations on Wednesday.

Sincerely,

Cathy

Hi Dr. Vrentas! 

     Thank you for taking the time and meeting with us, we really appreciate it! I just put our poster in the files section if you would like to take a look. We have fixed our poster based on the suggestions. Thanks for the recap on everything we talked about. If you have any other questions or suggestions we would love to hear them. 

Thank you! 

-Some Humans (Yasmine, Stella and Jacob) 

Hi team,

It was great to speak with you on Wednesday!  I am glad we were able to connect on Zoom and I hope you have had a good week at school.

As a recap, we discussed a few things about your slides:

--The fact that mushy stems could be some bacterial growth over a couple of days, and that the bluish/greenish color was still probably the food dye

--The process of osmosis--water can flow out of cells to create a balance when the water around the cells is very salty.  This means that the cells will shrivel up, and the celery will become "wilty."

--Water in the soil may have some other chemicals, like minerals (like our electrolyte water!) dissolved in it.  Water with other dissolved chemicals can still move into the plant.  But it can be complex, since there is a balance of water flows in and out of cells!

--The plant will need water for its cells, so that it can stand up straight and also because water is needed for the chemistry of life.  The plant gets energy from a different source--it captures the energy from light in sugars through photosynthesis, and then the sugars are broken down in the plant cells through respiration to provide the plant with energy.

I know you were mentioning at the end that you might need some additional feedback--was it on the poster or the slides?  I just wanted to check to make sure I was looking at the right place and answering the remaining questions that you had :)

Sincerely,

Cathy

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.

Hi Dr. Vrentas! 

All good, excited to meet with you on Wednesday! We wanted to update you on some of our information for our poster. We have concluded both our experiments with the celery too. I have put our google slides presentation in the files section if you would like to look at it.

-Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob and Stella) 

Hi team!

I have been having some issues with getting the forum messages due to some of my messages going to spam, so I know I missed out on the opportunity to chat on Zoom last week.  I apologize for this!! (Just to clarify--it is nothing wrong with the Planting Science portal, which is great--but my email).

So I wanted to make sure we had a chance to "meet" on video and so I made a video that talks about my background as a scientist and some of the things I like most about being a scientist.  I hope it will be helpful to you--I wanted you to know that I have really enjoyed being your mentor this semester, that it is important to me, and that I want to make sure you have a chance to get as much as possible out of this experience!

**To find the file--you can go under the Files tab to the left and it is the new video.  (I actually split it into three, to make sure it uploaded with the size.).  If there are any problems with the video opening, I will work on sharing it in a different way that is consistent with the Planting Science rules.

I hope you had a fun Halloween!  Did you have a costume?  I must say I was pretty boring (no costume for me) but I saw some really cool plant-related costumes online.  My favorite was someone who dressed up as a slug. Garden slugs can certainly cause havoc among vegetables...

Please feel free to let me know what questions you have.

Sincerely,

Cathy

Happy Halloween! 

     We wanted to let you know that we have concluded our experiment. We will upload the slides with all of our information. Some of the results we got were very interesting. I will upload the some pictures too. We will have a draft of the poster we are making soon. 

-Some Humans (Yasmine, Jacob, and Stella) 

Hi team,

Some more great data and pictures/drawings as well!  I really enjoy all of the information you have recorded.  I personally find that having graphics in scientific papers is very helpful in terms of helping me understand what the other scientists have done, just like you have depicted your different cups with celery. Another thing I like here is how you have noted the variables you have kept constant across the experiment, in order to control sources of variation as best as possible.

Keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Cathy