| Explore | We know that plants need light, CO2, and water. We also know that if more CO2 is present the photosynthesis |
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| Research Question | Does photosynthesis occur more efficiently in artificial light or natural? This question fits because we know photosynthesis already occurs faster and more efficiently under light than in the dark. However we don't know if natural light or artificial light is the best. |
| Predictions | Our hypothesis is that natural light will be more effective than the artificial light, because plants mostly already use natural light for photosynthesis. We believe that since the plants are already "used" to the natural light it will effectively work more than the artificial light. |
| Experimental Design | 1. We will get 10 leave disks for each type of light. (10 leaf disks per cup, 3 cups per type of light) 2. Then infiltrate them in syringes. 3. Take the leave disks and put them into their coordinating cups. (natural light cups and artificial light cups.) 4. Start a stopwatch, at every 2 minutes for 30 minutes, and take data on how many leave disks are floating. 5. After 30 minutes look at data and compare which had more leaf disks floating. Independent variable- Kinds of light. Dependent variable- Rate of photosynthesis. Constants- The amount of water, amount of disk leaves, amount of time we keep them out. |
| Conclusion | Throughout our experiment, we saw that natural light only had 1 leaf disk float out of 10 in 3 of our natural light cups. However, artificial light had almost all of the leaf disks float in all 3 of the artificial light cups. At the end of our experiment in natural light, cup 1 had 8 leaf disks float, cup 2 had 9 leaf disks float, and cup 3 all 10 of the leaf disks float. With natural light we had 0 leaf disks float in both cups 2 and 3 while in cup 1 we only had one leaf disk float at the end. We think this is because artificial light can be manipulated more than natural light. With natural light we could only rely on the sun, with hope it would pull through but clearly it didn't. On all days we were running our tests, the sun was never fully out. It was cloudy but we still worked with what we had to get some time of data for our experiment. |
| Investigation Theme | POS |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| Teacher Name | Stacey Yuhase |
| School Name | Morgantown High School |
| Session | Fall 2023 |