| Explore | From our experiences outside of school, we know that most plants die in the winter and bloom again in the spring and that most tree's leaves change color in the fall, before falling off. From background knowledge and discoveries in class, we know that plants make their own food through photosynthesis and that they need water and sunlight to survive. A question we have about plants is how the amount of water given effects the seed's growth. |
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| Research Question | Do you need the entire seed to grow a strong, healthy plant? We came up with this question because sometimes animals will eat part of a seed or a piece of a seed will break off. This question fits what we know about plants because we believe that plants can still grow as long as part of the center remains. |
| Predictions | We think that the plants will grow, as long as the part of the plant that allows it to grow is still intact with the seed. We think this because sometimes the seeds of a plant are not always whole, but can still grow. |
| Experimental Design | Our plan is to test whether or not you need the whole seed for the plant to grow by cutting the seeds into halves, seeds without the outer shell, and full seeds, and planting them, giving them the same amount of water, soil, and sunlight. Once they have grown, we will measure them by length and amount of leaves, and then we will average them together to see which ones grow!! First, we soaked all 25 of our seeds in water overnight. After that, we used a large knife to cut 5 in half and cut the shells off 10 of them. We planted the other ten how they were. In order to plant, we put 3/4 cup of soil each in fifteen solo cups. We then buried two seeds in each cup. Two halves in one cup, two full in one cup, and to shellless in one cup. Times five for each. Next, we watered the plants with 1/2 an inch of water each Monday and Thursday. Later, we poked three holes in the bottom of each cup. In order to measure the plants, we gently pulled them upwards and used a string to measure them, by dangling and measuring them in the height of the string. This is our experimental design. |
| Conclusion | Our hypothesis was partly correct. The seeds that contained the entire embryo did indeed grow. The half seeds didn't grow because the entire embryo was not intact. The seeds might not have grown because we didn't poke holes in the cup for water to drain out so they may have drowned. We think that maybe because they were smaller seeds, they could not absorb the water as easily as the others. Also we think that we may have made a mistake when we were measuring the plants towards the end because the height average went down. Our half plants did not grow but one, our without outer shell seeds grew mostly one plant per cup, and our full seeds grew mostly two plants per cup. We think the embryo has to be intact but in the case of the half seed that grew, it might have just been a mistake on our part. |
| Investigation Theme | WOS |
| Grade Level | Middle School Students (grades 6,7,8) |
| School Name | Nottingham Elementary |
| Session | Spring 2018 |
| About this Project | This team stood out for having an experiment that was different than many of the others. They decided to test to see if a seed embryo needed to be intact in order to grow. They also did an excellent job of communicating with their mentor and documenting plant growth and changes in their journals, data table and graphs. |