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? |
|---|---|
| Research Question | What do we want to test or study? How did we come up with the question(s). How does the question fit what we know about the topic? |
| Predictions | What are the possible outcomes of our study given the variables we are working with? What is our explanation for why and how we think this will happen? |
| Experimental Design | What is our plan? Be sure to include enough detail that another group can replicate our experiment. What variables will we test? What variables will we measure and observe? What variables will we keep constant? How will we record our data? |
| Conclusion | What claim can we make from our experiment? What are possible explanations for our results? How do the data we collected and our reasoning with scientific ideas support our claim? What future experiments could be done to expand on the results of this experiment? |
| About this Project |
Students on the team organized their experiment so well that I did not need to remind them to collect data from day to day or to communicate with their scientists. They came in ready to measure their plants and asked questions of the mentors as they came up with them. They organized the data... |
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
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.
@Gracie: If I follow you correctly, this means that the plant grew higher when the light was not coming directly from above?
@Emily: That's an interesting observation. BTW, plants don't perceive green light (that's the reason why plants are green, the chlorophyll (which is the green pigment giving the leaves its colour) is absorbing light radiations with an exception for wavelengths corresponding to green colour in the visible spectrum).
I also think it might come from the quantity of light perceived by the plants rather than water (especially if you watered all the plants equally).
As a general question: When you measure the plants, do you place them upright to measure the stem length? Didn't you observe that the plants are leaning towards light. I recommend you to google "phototropism" to have a look at what I mean.
great job all of you
hello, you are doing a great job so far. I am a little curious, did you notice anything special regarding how the plants are growing depending of the light angle, besides the height?
Hi! Thanks for getting back to us. I think the only visible thing we've noticed over the course of the experiment besides the height changes is the color of the plants. I've noticed that on the "side angle" plants, some of the leaves turned yellow, whereas most if not all of the leaves in the lighting directly above is a healthy green color. None of our plants wilted to my knowledge, so I don't believe it's a watering issue (although our schedules don't allow us to water as regularly as we probably should). Perhaps this is happening because some leaves aren't getting enough light energy to absorb the red and green light as effectively as other leaves.
Hi Thomas, we have noticed that the plants have grown towards the light. The final measurements for the plants were plant 1: 10.5 cm, plant 2: 12 cm, and plant 3: 11.5cm.
Hi! We watered our plants after not watering them over the weekend. For each plant, we watered them approximately half a plastic cup of water. Plants 2 and 3 were bottom watered and Plant 1 was watered normally, like the last time. We then measured the height again: Plant 1 is 8cm, Plant 2 is 9cm, and Plant 3 is 10cm. The variation in the height could be a result of the soil, because I've noticed that the soil could be dense or lightly packed, which could take away from the true height of the plant. There could also be human error because the plant might not be held straight enough for measuring. The measuring might not be done accurately. All of these sources of error could be a factor in the results of the lab.
Hi! Today we watered our plants after a few days with no water. I bottom-watered plants 2 & 3 with approximately half a plastic cup for each plant. I also watered plant 1 half a plastic cup of water, too. We then measured the new height of the plants: plant 1 is 9 cm tall, plant 2 is 11 cm, and plant 3 is 9 cm. These measurements were taken from the soil to the the tallest plant in the cup. It doesn't seem like the plants were affected to much from the lack of water, but they have been responding well to the light treatments. We will be sure to keep you updated on any progress.
Update:
We watered the plants with 30 c.c. yesterday and 10 c.c. today. We also put it under different light angles for each plant. One 90 degree angle, second 0 degree angle, and third 45 degree angle. We will start observing progressing changes.
Hi! We also decided to remove the plants from the plastic cups they were in so thee light could truly be horizontal. Because of this, we decided to "bottom water" our plants by tilting a tray and placing the plants at the bottom so water would gather. In addition to the 10 mL of water we added before setting up our actual light-angling experiment, we added approximately half a plastic cup of water to each of the trays. We will be sure to note any progress and/or changes in our experiment.
Hi! Yesterday I watered the plants with 30mL of water. We set up our experiment today because all of the plants have started to grow. We watered all of the plants with 10mL today. Here is the data we collected for today.
Plant 1- light angle 90^o (vertical)
Plant 2- light 0^o (horizontal)
Plant 3- light 45^o
Height recorded based off of the tallest plant.
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Plant 1 |
Plant 2 |
Plant 3 |
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Height initial (cm) |
6cm |
11cm |
7cm |
Hi! I will be sure to double check with my peers tomorrow, but I think it took about 9 days between when we planted the seeds and when we saw them germinate. I think this number would have been a little shorter if we had put them in a water-retaining container sooner, but we will probably begin our lighting experiment this week at some point. On Friday, we added approximately 30 mL of water to keep it moist throughout the weekend since no one would have been around. We will be sure to keep you updated on any progress tomorrow when we meet for class. Thanks!!
Great!! congratulations!!!!!!
Just by curiosity, how long did it take in total for the seeds to germinate?
Hi! After placing the peat pots in the plastic cups and giving them a more generous amount of water (50mL), two seeds started to break through the soil in cups 1 and 3. Today we only added 20 mL of water to the cups so we don't overwater. We don't have class tomorrow but we will have someone in our group swing by tomorrow to check any progress and water the plants again.
Hi!
Yesterday we added more water than we have been in the past. This new set up was hoped to assist in growth through "bottom watering" as had been suggested. Today we checked the progress and we can tell there has been growth so far. We will keep you updated!
Katie
Update:
It started growing! Container 1 and 3 plants broke the soil. We watered each plant again with 30 cc of water. Hopefully plant 2 is going to grow. I think 30 cc of water is the best amount to water each day since it grew from last time. We will keep you updated.