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 | We have decided to test which way of planting is the best between hydroponics, aquaponics, or the conventional way of planting. We came up with the question because we were curious to see which way of planting would be best to grow. |
| Predictions | We predict that the aquaponics will work best. The fish will benefit the growth of the plant as the plants will benefit the fish because the fish's waste will be used as a good fertilizer and the plant will purify the fish's environment. Which will cause everything to grow. |
| Experimental Design | Our plan is to figure out which way of planning is the best.We will test a hydroponics, aquaponics, and the conventional way of planting. For the hydroponic we have used a cut gallon, rockwool, and styrofoam. For the aquaponics we used the same size gallon, a aquarium filter, 4 freshwater fish,... |
| Conclusion | We can claim that the fish will be a good use to the plants as the plants will benefit the fish. The possible explanation is that the waste from the fish will be used as a fertilizer and the plant will purify the living environment for the fish. |
| About this Project |
Students truly went above and beyond working through their projects and thought outside of the box comparing plant growth differences between hydroponics, aquaponics and convention farming. They also maintained a clean and clear notebook throughout the project and responded to their mentor... |
Updates
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
My best wishes to all of you!
Hi team, thank you for the report. It is common, when you do an experiment for the first time, that you run into some glitches, and it looks as if your group saw some examples. If you had to do it again, or if you had to advise another group of students who want to address the same question, what would you do different or what would you tell the new group?
I am curious how much and what kind of fertilizer you applied. Did the soil get any fertilizer? How much fish feed did you use and did the fish eat all of it? And ... how big were the fish? 1" 10"? ... Why do you think that I am asking these questions? :-)
You mentioned testing of the water for nutrients, etc. -- did you record any data from those and could anything be concluded from those?
The temperature of the hydroponic system seems to be cooler than the other two systems – could this have affected radish growth? Would radishes grow best under warm or cool conditions?
I presume the growth measurements were from the ... seed? to the tip of the longest leaf, or something along those lines?
Lots of questions -- is there anything I haven't asked yet, that I should have asked? :-)
All the best!
Hello, we re-uploaded the files
Hi team,
Welcome back from Spring Break! At your earliest convenience, please kindly re-upload the report in a compatible format so that your mentor can help provide feedback. Thanks so much!
Paul - Your scientist liaison :)
Hi team!
It looks as though you are trying to share a Google document. Unfortunately, this is not compatible with our platform, and you will need to save the file as a Word document or a PDF and share it in the "Files" tab. Thank you!
When I click on the "Bubble Guppies- Agriscience Fair Written Report Te…plate.gdoc" I am told that I cannot download a 0kb file. Is it really 0 kb? Almost anything should make it more than that
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.
The fish came from the aquaponic system and when he (or she) was removed, the plants started growing while they had not been growing before? Is this pattern clear? (all the plants, or just a few of them?). And you are wondering whether the presence of the fish could have inhibited the growth of the plants? I wouldn't immediately be able to explain such a phenomenon -- can you think of ways it might be explained?
We did the water tests to be able to see what could be affecting the growth of our plants. One of the fish has died and we believe he had a flesh eating disorder. He had scales missing and what looked like to be blood on his side. After removing him from the system to see if he could heal, the plants actually started to grow in the aquaponic system. Could that have possibly been affecting the growth of or plants?
Thank you for the update. My ability to comment and ask questions is somewhat hampered by the fact that it is not all that clear to me what exactly is being done in your experiments. Scientists often cannot see first-hand what others are doing, and rely on detailed descriptions to find out. For example, I googled up "urban water test kit" and found that there are a number of different types and brands that will test for either a large number or smaller number of things. You do provide some additional information. But I think there is almost no chance that there are no bacteria in your hydroponic system ... unless you sterilized everything and then somehow kept it sterile (not easy to do). You probably mean that the test for bacteria came up negative, but it was probably testing for only certain types of bacterial, and there is probably a detection limit so that very small populations could not be detected (and should not be detected because they have little meaning for the health-related qualities of drinking water). Anyway, will you all be writing up some sort of a report in due time, describing what exactly you did, and what the results and conclusions are? I know, sounds like a lot of work :-)
Hi Mr. Baudoin we took your advice and planted three more seeds in each system. Therefore, we have a total of 6 seeds in each. We called the added seeds "Trial 2" and so far the growth has been almost immediate. Also our teacher, gave us a urban water test kit, and we are testing the PH balance and contents of our water. For example, we gathered water from both the hydro and aquaponic system, and soil from the conventional and tested the amount of iron, phosphate, copper, chlorine, copper and dissolved oxygen. Based on this testing we found out there is bacteria in our aquaponic system but not in our hydroponic system.
How many seeds did you plant in each system? Only three? A larger number would give you a better chance to spot any differences. How many seeds would you need in order to tell the difference between, say, 90% and 60% germination? Is it still possible to plant more (but keep track of planting date)?
So far in our aquaponics system only 1 of our seeds are budding, one got destroyed by our water filter, and the other seed has shown no progress so far. In our hydroponics system we have two seeds that have grown and the other has no progress. In our conventional system only one of our seeds have grown while there is no progress in the other two.
Our plan is to figure out which way of planning is the best.We will test a hydroponics, aquaponics, and the conventional way of planting. For the hydroponic we have used a cut gallon, rockwool, and styrofoam. For the aquaponics we used the same size gallon, a aquarium filter, 4 freshwater fish, rockwool, and styrofoam. We will measure the growth of the plant and the water temperature. We will keep the watering and feeding of the fish constant. We will use our science notebooks to record our data.
This is what the entry says but apparently does not show, sorry for the inconvenience.
Perhaps, I cannot see the entire description of the experimental design? It ends with " gallon, a aquarium filter, 4 freshwater fish,..." which seems incomplete.
Steven, thanks for the explanation. It's just that from the pdf file with picture and the notebook pages, it's hard for me to puzzle out exactly how your systems work and what you can compare. I presume that you will provide further explanation at some point? I received a boatload of PlantingScience alerts this afternoon that the project had been updated, but I cannot find very much change.