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. 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

Excellent work thinking through possible sources of error, and what you would change!

​​​​​​How confident are you in your results? (Use a statement from the confidence chart and support your statement using examples from the bullet points.)

I am not confident at all in our results because I conducted less than 3 trials. Additionally, we did not consider all of the possible sources of error (such as the temperature). Furthermore, we did not maintain all of our controls such as the temperature, and amount of water, and during the weekend they did not even all receive their assigned light wattage.

​​What are three sources of error during your investigation and how did they affect your results?

4. What would you do differently if you were to investigate your SAME question again?

If I did this Same question again I would change the experiment in many ways. For starters, I would only put the seeds under the light for 8 hours. Additionally,  I would put the box in a dark room and cut holes in the box to allow ventilation and control the temperature. Finally, I would do more research to find out the appropriate amount of water to give each of our plants. I would then make sure each petri dish was receiving a consistent amount of water.

WaterKingz: I have really enjoyed working with you!

Great job on the Conclusion! You've explained your results really well. Just one suggestion - at the end, you have a sentence that says you didn't get any results. However, you did get results - your results were that the seeds did not germinate. Your statement could say that you were not able to observe the effect of light intensity, but your results did show that high temperatures have a negative effect on seed germination.

Really good work on your project!

Thank you for being our scientist and giving us helpful suggestions throughout our experiment!

Thank you so much for helping us with our investigation really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for being our scientist and communicating with us! We really appreciate it!

Thank you for those suggestions we will definitely keep that in mind.

I agree that your experimental evidence did not support your prediction. However, I would not say that your evidence disproves your hypothesis. I think the effect of light on germination is still an open question.

Instead of sticking with your original prediction, maybe you could write a claim based on the effect of temperature (rather than the effect of light) on seed germination.

Many times, scientific experiments do not result in the patterns we expected, but often we can still use our experimental evidence to learn unexpected things.

I am guessing you have already disposed of your seeds, but if not, you could look at each seed and see if any of them have cracked seed coats. That would also be evidence of germination - or the beginning of germination.

You can use the swollen seeds as evidence. Your bar graph could show the percent of seeds in each light treatment that swelled.

Thanks for sharing these results. It is interesting that some of the seeds swelled - this is the first step in the germination process. When seeds absorb water, they swell, and the dormant embryo (baby plant) inside the seed begins to grow. 

We saw very little evidence of seed germination. On days 2 and 3 we saw that a few of the seeds had swollen up in the 40 and 60-watt conditions. However, this was short-lived given they quickly shriveled back up.

Based on our evidence, we think our claim will is inaccurate because due to the extreme temperature of the seeds environment we were not able to actually measure how the wattage of light affects seed growth.

We have decided to analyze our data using a bar graph because we are measuring the average growth of the different wattages of light. The bar graph best shows that plants did not grow which helps to disprove our hypothesis.

Thanks so much for sharing the photos of your seeds! It's hard for me to be certain - did you see any evidence of germination? If so, in what light conditions did seeds germinate?

Here are pictures of our seeds on the last day of our investigation.

Yes, 130 degrees is pretty hot! I'm glad to hear you checked the temperature under the boxes. Is it possible to put the seed trays and boxes on some sort of a screen that is raised up above the table top, so that there is more air circulation around the dishes (from below)? I am thinking of a screen with big holes, like the screens you might see under fluorescent ceiling lights.

The boxes are covering up the lamps and seeds to ensure the seeds are not receiving any other light. However, after measuring the temperature in the boxes our 100 watts light bulb was 130degrees Fahrenheit, and all of the other boxes have similar temperatures. We predict this is contributing to our seeds not germinating.

PS Be careful that the seeds don't get TOO wet. We don't want them to get moldy!

It's good to see the photos! I am having trouble making sense of the picture with the boxes. Are there different light sources inside the boxes?

Annie - I deleted your last two posts, because we can't share our things using Google docs or photos on this site. Please upload them as files. See the files tab in the menu on the left. 

Hi Water Kingz! Here are some answers to your questions:

I study native prairie plants, especially Echinacea angustifolia, narrow-leaved purple coneflower. The American tall grass prairie has been mostly replaced by agricultural fields. Less than 1% of the tall grass prairie remains, in small, isolated patches. My research team, the Echinacea Project, is trying to understand how the fragmentation of the native prairies is affecting native plants. 

I decided to be a scientist because I love biology! I wanted to learn more about plants so I would be better prepared to teach students about plants, and the more I learn about plants, the more amazed I am!

I admire Asa Gray (a famous botanist) and Katharine Hayhoe (a climate scientist).

One of my favorite quotes comes from the end of Charles Darwin's book, The Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have, and are being evolved."

In my free time, I like to visit friends and family, go for walks, and read.

Great idea to measure the intensity of light, using bulbs of different wattage. It will be interesting to see whether light intensity makes a difference in germination and/or in growth of the seedlings after they germinate.

Bye for now,

Amy

Hello Water Kingz!

I'm a professor at Bethel University in Minnesota. The snow is melting here - I think we will have some natural seed germination outside at the same time as your seeds are germinating indoors!

I liked the questions you posted. How might you design an experiment to answer one of them?

Amy

Nice plan! How about taking some pictures as well? Maybe some photos of your experiments setup, recording the germinated seeds and final results. They will be excellent resources if you ever want to present your project to others.

Hello

We are going from the root to the leaf using centimeters in order to record the length of the seedling.

When the seed shows its first signs of growth from either the roots or leaves we will classify the seed as germinated.

Thank you for your feedback!