Dear Dragon Blood Trees -

Please give yourselves a round of high fives for bringing your project to a successful conclusion.  You overcame some difficult initial problems and decisions and then really got busy figuring things out as you went through the experiment.  I was impressed with your postings to this website, which were among the most literate I have seen in years.  I greatly enjoyed meeting you by Zoom, and I wish there had been more time to have additional meetings towards the middle and end of the project. 

Best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving and a successful completion of this first half of the school year.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Schnabel

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. You have until Friday, November 19, 2021, to post ALL of your updates, comments, and goodbyes. 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

Hello, thank you so much for your help and advice. P.S we are making a presentation next week. From the Dragon Blood Tree's

Dear DBTs -

Thanks for uploading those photos of your graphs.  I have three suggestions/questions:

1) For the height data, I think the line graph is more successful than the bar graph.  It's easier to read - to see the differences between treatments.

2) Also for the height data, is there a way in your graphing program to make the x-axis give the number of days after planting rather than the date.  For example, if you planted on 10/8 and took your first data on 10/14, then you could call 10/8 day 0 and 10/14 day 6.  Then you would count the days from day 0 and plot your x-axis a continuous variable between 0 and 21 (three weeks from planting).  I'm suggesting this, because the measurements were not evenly spaced in time - some were two days in row and some were a week apart.  The plants have more time to change in a week than in a day.

3) On all graphs, I suggest adding units of measure to the y-axis label, such as "Height of plant (cm)".

4) For the data on plant weight, are the data shown in the graph the averages for each concentration, or did you put all the plants together from one treatment and get a total weight?  I think the correct way to collect and analyze these data would be this:  a) measure the weight of all plants in each pot to get 2-3 measurements for each salt treatment; b) divide those weights by the number of plants in each pot to get a weight per plant, because some pots had 4 plants and some had 5; c) take the average weight for each salt treatment.

I'm going to try to upload the graph I made of your data.  This may or may not work.  I included only 6 of your measurement days in the graph - I think I'm missing one week of data.

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

Hi Team,

I noticed that your experimental design is still in draft form. Please update that today. Make sure your salt to water ratio is clear - I see .8 salt but no explanation of units of measurement and how much water you were dissolving the salt into.

Journals: Make sure you are writing about your conclusions as you discuss the results with each other. I should see updated journals posted from everyone. Luke's is missing. Post your graphs, too.   

Next, go to this Planting Science resource page . Your group needs to answer these questions - in writing. Post your answers here on the blog so your mentor can give you feedback.

Keep up the good work!

Hi Everyone,

You have been working hard with documenting your experiments, so please make sure that your most recent journal has been uploaded to your Planting Science Files tab. The file name cannot contain your last name, and it needs to be downloaded as a pdf. Please do not attach Google docs!!

Good morning Quinn and team -

Yes, I've made a line graph for the height data as well.  If you can upload your graph - either a screen shot of the graph or perhaps the actual file you used to create the graph - then I'd be happy to compare mine to yours to see if we agree.

Best regards,

A. Schnabel

Hi,

    We did line graphs for our height data, and I think that we are doing bar graphs for the total weight. 

Dear DBTs -

Very cool photos of those roots.  Did you measure them?  If you did, what were the procedures you followed?  If you are going to do a presentation, perhaps you could include those photos and label them with their treatment, as they show multiple differences in plant size and other features.

Best regards,

A. Schnabel

Hi Team -

Congratulations on getting those final data recorded.  I'll have a look at your journal entries over the weekend.  Next week you put together a presentation about your project?  I'd like to hear your ideas for the best way to present the data as a graph.

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

Our Final Mass Weight- average (grams):

Control- .8

.4- 1.2

.8- 1.2

.1- .3

Hello, here are today's measurements. 

Here is what I put in my journal today:

Comparing the control to the .4 concentration I can see that the tips are full brown and some of them are all shriveled up. I can conclude that we over-watered them and there wasn't enough sunlight. The control is doing better than the others but not by much. The controls seem in better shape as of height and how green they are.. The control showed some signs of dying but not as much as the .8 or the .4 concentration. Otherwise the plants are doing the same as they have been. I think the turning point in this experiment is 10.19.21 that is when things started to go downhill. That's all for now.

I hope this is helpful!

Here are today's measurements.

Hi Professor Schnable, here are the measurement from Tuesday. 

Hi, we don't have any data for yesterday, because we didn't have school. 

Hi Everyone -

It's troubling that ALL of your plants are unhappy.  You might think that at least the control plants would still be healthy, although perhaps a little bit spindly due to low light levels.  I see that Jazzlyn may have tried to upload a couple of photos, but those have not come through for me.  It would be good to have a look at these unhappy plants.

Looking forward to seeing the next set of measurements as well -

Andrew Schnabel

Hi Professor Schnabel, 

    We will be finished with collecting data by the end of this week. We moved the plants to grow lights. 

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Our plants are all practically dead. Sorry for the bad news.

It also seems that they are shrinking... somehow.

Hello, this week our plants aren't looking very good. Most of them are shriveling up and dying in all of the pots. The pipe cleaners aren't working very well, so we have decided to just let the plants be. We are planning on doing root length but we will not be doing dry weight. At the end of this week, we are most likely going to be done collecting data.

Dear DBTs -

How are your plants looking this week?  Are the props working?  I'd be eager to see more data and more photos, as I hear from your teacher that this might be the final week of data collection. 

I've been keeping a graph of the data as you send it to me, and I'd like to see in the end, if my graph looks like your graph and whether we reach the same conclusions about your experiment. 

Also, I recall that you were going to collect data on final dry weight and root length of each plant.  Are you still planning for that?  If so, and you aren't sure just how to go about that data collection, we can discuss it through these posts.

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

Hi, for lighting, we just have the classroom lights. The yellow color is most likely from the salt. 

Hi, thanks for letting us know. This is the correct data. The top one is the first .8 pot and the bottom one is the second. We think that our plants need support, so maybe we could stick a pencil in the pot and lightly use string to tie it around the plants? 

Hello Dragon Blood Trees -

Continued growth - that's great.  Differences between treatments are becoming even easier to see!

Three quick notes:

1) It looks like you have accidentally repeated the data for your third control pot in the first 0.8 pot.

2) You have started including your zero numbers in your averages, but that's not correct.  If a seed has not germinated, then there is no measurement to make.  It's not a zero - it's just no measurement.  So for example, the second control pot has four plants, and heights of only those plants would be included in the average. 

3) I'm going to continue to assert that your third control pot will not be usable, because it got a much later start than all the other pots.  Thus, that pot has not received the same growing conditions as the other two pots, and so it violates the design of your experiment.  Leaving it in will mess things up; taking it out is the correct move.

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

Good day Team -

Excellent observations about color, wilting, stem thickness, and other features!   Those are all important observations in helping you round out your explanation of the effects your treatments are having.  Let's try to understand what's happening to your plants right now:

1) You have some changes in color (yellowing, red pigment).  What might the causes be?  I'm not convinced by the hypothesis that the red color signals a build-up of sugars.  Sugars are not red.  Could the color changes be due to too much or too little light?  How much light are you giving them?  What's the lighting set-up you are using?

2) You are seeing some wilting and leaning.  What might the causes be?  What hypotheses can you come up with to explain these observations? 

Let's get a discussion going about the possible causes of these new developments. 

Last, thanks for the data, but the data you uploaded are the same as the data you previously posted for the second 0.8 pot.  Thus, you are still missing the data for the first 0.8 pot.

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

    Hi, we will take the control pot out when we average all of the pots for each group together at the end. 

More plants in the .1 group are turning yellow. The stems of all of the plants are still red, which is the buildup of sugar, and are wilting,leaning, and droopy. We think that they may need more support. The plants being watered with the saltier concentrations have thicker stems than the controls. We didn’t measure today, but we did water, and are going to measure once a week. The leaves are oval-shaped. 

Hello, we are keeping the zeros in only to show that we looked to see if there were any plants growing. We can stop continuing to have the zeros in the average though. After talking some more, we have decided that we will continue measuring the control but we can take that pot out of the average for our controls. Here is the correct data for those plants that had repeated data

hi, we have decided that we will keep Control 3 in the project because if we take it out it will mess things up.

Hello team -

Thanks for the continued data updates.  I see that your third control pot now has some germination.  Unfortunately, I don't think you can include those plants in your experiment, because they are so far behind the rest.  I'm building a graph of your data, and I can see that you are getting some interesting differences among treatments already.  Congratulations!

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

Hi, weighing the dry weight of the plants at the end of our project seems like a great idea and we will definitely do that at the end. We measured and watered all of our plants today.

Hi, weighing the dry weight of the plants at the end of our project seems like a great idea and we will definitely do that at the end. We measured and watered all of our plants today.

Hi Teams!

It's great to see plants growing! Hopefully all groups will see some growth by Monday. A few things to keep in mind:

Water - you may need to adjust the amount! If you have 100 mL daily written in your experimental design, but your plants are sitting in soil soup, it's ok to record the observation that they don't need that much water, and adjust the amount / frequency of watering (unless amount of water is your independent variable). 

Recording data: 

Data tables are great for organizing data! Add your unit of measurement to the heading of each column - and just record numbers on your table. It's a good idea to include 0's to show no growth so it is clear that nothing grew.

Keep up the great work and keep asking questions!

When averaging your plant heights, don't forget to divide by the total number of plants in the pot. If you notice that most of your plants are an average of 2 cm tall, but one group stands out at 16 cm, check to see if it really is that much larger. 

Make sure you are giving other group members a chance to measure and discuss your observations to see if anyone notices differences you may have missed.

Hi Luke -

Glad to hear that you are back in the research lab.  I've started tracking your group's data, so please encourage them to keep posting. 

I thought of one more dependent variable you might be able to measure at the end of the experiment: total above-ground dry weight of the plants.  To use this variable, you'd need to cut each plant at the soil level at the end of the experiment, put each in very small envelope, dry them for a couple of days, and then weigh them.  I don't know what the quality of your balances is in your lab, but if it's good enough, you could then get a measure of total growth for each plant.  That would add extra information beyond the growth in height or the growth of roots.

Hope you all have a good weekend -

Andrew Schnabel

I've been absent for a week and haven't been able to do anything with this project but my group just caught me up with everything so i'm okay.

Thanks for the advice, here are today's measurements. 

Dear Team -

It was great to visit with you yesterday.  I see that you are off and running with watering and measuring.  I'm looking forward to seeing frequent data posts in the future.  One quick point - I think you should probably exclude seeds that don't germinate from your analysis.  For example, for your second control pot, you have 4 plants and one seed that did not germinate.  You gave that ungerminated seed a measurement of 0, but I think the correct thing to do would be not to give it any measurement so that your average would be only for the four seedlings that are present.  This would change your average to (6.4+5.7+5.8+7.1)/4 = 6.25. 

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

We watered the plants with salt concentrations today. 

Hello! I was dissmised from school before I was able to plant with my group. Just letting you know. Also for the DBTs, update me with what we have to with our jounals. I am not sure what to write in my journal exactly since I missed the planting and wasn't able to see what happened. 

Congratulations!  Keep your fingers crossed for good germination.

Hi, today we planted. 

Hi Everyone! 

We have groups that have started planting today! Very exciting!! Some groups have questions because we are not in school after today until 10/13, so that will affect plants that are getting a reduced amount of light and it may affect some groups watering schedules.

I hope to have photos of projects added soon, and the students are starting their science journals today!

Students are also very excited about upcoming Zooms with mentors. 

Keep up the good work!

Dear Dragon Blood Trees -

Thank you very much for the added explanation of your salt concentrations.  Let me see if I correctly understand what you are doing:

Salinity of sea water can be measured in parts per thousand (ppt).  This is calculated as:

salinity in ppt = grams of salt / 1000 grams of sea water

For pure water, 1000 grams = 1000 milliliters or 1 liter

Thus, for your concentration of 30 ppt, you'll need to dissolve 30 grams salt in 970 ml pure water.  Then, the combination will be 1000 grams, and 30 grams of that will be salt.  For a concentration of 5 ppt, you'll need to dissolve 5 grams salt in 995 ml pure water.

From all the information I can find, oceans have a salinity of 35 ppt, but freshwater lakes and rivers have a salinity at or below 1 ppt.  Since you are shooting for brackish waters, which are a mixture of sea water and fresh water, you'll need some values in between 1 ppt and 35 ppt.  Thus, if you do 30 ppt, 18 ppt, and 5 ppt, as Jazzlyn has written in the latest post, you'll be in that range.  However, I'm thinking that 30 ppt will be too high, and so I suggest keeping 18 ppt as your high end, but trying something like 2 ppt for your low end.  All you would need to add is the control (no salt at all - 0 ppt).

Am I understanding what you are proposing correctly?  If not, please feel very free to explain where I've misunderstood your plan.

Thanks very much, and keep up the good work.  You are getting very close to a final design.

Best regards,

Andrew Schnabel

Materials:

1. Salt: .8 times three=2.4 30ppt .4 times three=1.2 18ppt .1times three=.3 5 ppt  3.9 times 10=39 grams

2. 39 grams of salt 

3. 12 pots

4. ¾ cup of soil per pot (times twelve)=nine cups 

5. One hundred twenty corn seeds-five per pot 

6. 39 grams of salt 

7. two liters and seven hundred milliliters of water total

8. Two seeds to a cup

Hi, we are hoping to compare our salt concentrations to those of brackish water, such as a salt marsh.