| Explore | We love to garden and are pretty decent student in science class. We also wonder if artificial light vs. real light affects the rate of growth. We also love to works with herbs and plants. We all have worked with plants and have had a garden at one point in time. We know that plants need a source of warmth and water. We know that different types of plants need different things. We also wonder what would happen if we grew plants at different angles. We learned in class that a verity of different thing could happen to plants when experimenting on them. We are pretty good at math and are not afraid to get our hands dirty. We want to work with nasturtium. Bridget has grown tomatoes well, Anushka has grown watermelon well, Sierra has grown butternut squash, and Gwyn has grown chives well. We all have grown flowers and enjoyed the project. We can't wait to start our project. |
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| Research Question | How much does it affect seeds to be grown under a grow light vs. sunlight? |
| Predictions | We predict that the plant under the growing light will grow some, but not as much as a plant with direct sunlight because of infrared and ultraviolet light waves. |
| Experimental Design | Project Materials: 3/4 cup Organic Soil, 8 quick grow Nasturtiums Seeds, Grow lights, Sunlight, 4 Paper cups, and Water. 1. Take a cup and then put the organic soil in it. 2. Gently push two nasturtium seeds, each an inch deep in the soil, each an inch apart. 3. Copy steps 1 and 2 for the other three cups. 4. Once all of the seeds have been planted, water each plant with about a tablespoon, and continue to do that throughout the experiment (If it becomes too dry or too wet, then water when needed, but only until it is moist). 4. Put two of the cups under a grow light and the other two where they can get direct sunlight. 5. Continue to water and maintain the plants. 6. Once the plants have sprouted be sure to measure how tall the plants are about every day. Also, check to make sure the plants are healthy. |
| Conclusion | We can conclude that our experiment resulted in the grow light plants become far healthier than the sunlight plants. They are healthier with greener leaves and none of the plants have shriveled. The data we collected furthers this with all of the growlight plants growing taller than the sunlight plants. There were some problems in the experiment however, that may have contributed to our final data. To begin, we did not properly measure how much water each plant receives. In addition, we did not measure every day, so we could not measure the rate of growth of the plants. The final problem that we encountered was that people may have been accidentally kicking our box, inadvertently pushing it out of the sunlight. This may have caused the sunlight plants to not have done so well. All of these problems may have slightly affected the outcome of our experiment. However, the end result does show that the plants did better in the grow light. |
| Investigation Theme | WOS |
| Grade Level | Middle School Students (grades 6,7,8) |
| School Name | Nottingham Elementary |
| Session | Spring 2018 |