Info
| Explore | We have come up with three ideas for our project. Our main question idea that we would like to investigate is... Do different types of liquids effect the percent of Alfalfa seeds that germinate? Our other two ideas were... Does changing sunlight effect the speed of Alfalfa seed... |
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| Research Question | Do different kinds of liquids effect the percentage of seeds that actually germinate? |
| Predictions | We all think that the plant with the water will make the most percentage of alfalfa seeds grow. |
| Experimental Design | *Plant pots *Alfalfa seeds *Potting soil *Salt *The acid we are using is sulphur dioxide acid. *Tap Water *mL Measuring Tool *mg Measuring tool We will put 500 mg of soil in each pot. We will also put 10 seeds in each pot. For the pots with salt we will mix 50 mg of salt with 1,000 mL... |
| Conclusion | From our investigation we found out that the plants we gave the acid to had the most plants germinate. The water plants germinated the second best. Our salt-water plants had no plants germinate. 9 out of 40 plants germinated for the acid. The acid plants were the highest germinating plants. No... |
| About this Project |
Updates
Your results are incredibly interesting! I can't believe that so many of the acid plants germinated over the water plants. I wonder if you used less salt in the salt water if it would've let those plants grow a little too. I know plants do need a little salt to help them grow.
This was an awesome experiment and I'm so honor to have been able to help you all through it! Thank you for allowing me to be your mentor! Best of luck in your future endeavors and have a wonderful end of the school year!
We have uploaded our last pictures of our graph and data table. We had a lot of fun! Thank you very much for your help in our investigation!
Nice job you uploaded it 5 times, nevermind you deleted them...
Thanks for helping us with our investigation! We really appreciated your help. We just uploaded our pictures of our data table and graph. I had a lot of fun doing this investigation and learned quite a bit! Once again thanks so much for taking time to help us out:)
Thank you so much, we had tons of fun doing our investigation. We learned that sulfur helps plants grow. Thanks again for taking time to help our team.
Looks like you are in the final stages of your projects
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.
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.
Please come back and visit the PlantingScience Research Gallery Archive anytime (Found under Community>Projects) to view this project in the future. You can search the Archive by key word, team name, topic, or school name.
Good bye for now.
Warm regards,
The PlantingScience team
We have uploaded a new picture. It shows the sprouting on one of our plants. To our surprise it was one of the acid plants! There is another pot of acid that has a small sprout and there is a water pot with a small sprout. All other pots besides those three have not sprouted yet.
That's really interesting! How long have they been growing? Something I just thought of because I was looking at your project info. Sulfur dioxide (your acid rain) is a compound that is naturally made by volcanoes and having worked in volcanic soils, I know that sulfur is important for those tropical plants growth. So, it might be possible that rather than acting like an acid, the SO2 is helping the plants.
We have been able to see our sprouts grow for roughly 5 days. The acid looks to be helping the plants like you said, but how and why is the acid helping the plants? We also added a picture, the red square is water, salt-water is in the blue square, and acid is in the green square.
It might be helpful to do a little online research about what sulfur does for plants and maybe look at the nutrients that are in the potting soil you've used. It might be possible that the potting soil is low on sulfur, so when your adding it as acid the plants are just eating it up.
No worries! It honestly happens more times than I care to admit, hahah
REALLY sorry Cari... I think I just saw an 'l' at the end of your name and not an 'i'. Please accept my apologies!!!!
Pictures are helpful!
The biggest question I think I have for your team is to clarify the 'effect' variable that you are planning to measure.... In your question you indicate 'percent germination' and in your procedures you mention measuring height for growth.... Which are you intending to measure? Maybe both?
I would recommend both because it's possible either one could tell you something different! Maybe your water treated plants grew the most sprouts, but the acid treated plants grew the tallest!
Okay, thanks for helping us!
We are trying to find out if different types of liquids effect the percent of Alfalfa seeds that germinate. We will see how many seeds sprout with the different liquids.
Oh okay, so you're just counting how many sprouts you get? I would think a bar graph would be the best graph for you to use then.
We were wondering what graph would be best for our investigation data. We were thinking about using the bar graph or histogram. We would appreciate your opinion on which graph would be best for our data.
Thanks!
What kind of data are you taking? Once I know that I'll be better able to help you with a graph. What I mean is what are you planning to measure to say this plant grew better over this other plant?
The picture we uploaded show our plants. The four plants in the red square are the ones we give regular water. The four plants in the blue square are given Salt Water. And the four plants in the green are the plants given Acid. We tested our acid solution and the ph of our acid is 4.
Very nice! I like your set up!
Hello team! My name is Cari and I'm thrilled to help you through your wonders of seeds project!
I am currently a graduate students at Bowling Green State University, which basically means after my 16 years in school I wasn't ready to stop. But it's super cool because now I ask questions and do experiments everyday! My most exciting experiment took place in Hawaii over the summer. I am interested in how nutrients within the soil can change the number of bugs present there and how active they are. These little bugs are super important because they are ripping up the leaf litter and making it accessible to microbes, who can then take the nutrients from the dead leaf crumbs and return them to the soil waiting for plants to take them up. So, basically over the summer I trekked up into the Hawaiian rainforest many times to play with dirt and bugs. I'd love to tell you more if you're interested!
I'm looking forward to working with you!
We would love to learn more about your Hawaii trip!
I'd love to tell you more! The Hawaiian rainforest is very unlike other rainforest you see on TV. The vegetation is similar, but there is a lot fewer animals in Hawaii, just because it's so remote. There are LOADS of birds though. And you can hear them singing the entire time you are walking though and its so incredible. Those birds are located no where else in the world! And I feel very lucky to have been able to hear them.
Hawaii is super unique though because the volcano gives nutrients to the soil, but all of the plants are growing so quickly they eat up all the nutrients as soon as they're there. Might be something you all want to think about too!
Is there anything specific you want to know more about?
Looks like you are moving forward and have some feedback from your mentor! His question is the same as mine...what kinds of liquids are you thinking of using? Maybe consider the kinds of liquids a seed like alfalfa might be exposed to out in the 'real world'?
Yes! Knowing what liquids would happen in the real world would be awesome. I'm thinking about acid rain (though that might not be possible), polluted water, or maybe water high in nutrients to mimic water run off from farm fields.
Also, just to clarify, I'm a her No big deal, it's probably hard to tell from my photo. I'll probably change it.
We updated our investigation questions, if you would please take a look at them and which one is better and if we need to improve.
Thanks!
I think it would be really easy to combine your two questions about different types of liquids. You could first look at how many of the seeds germinated and then at the end of the experiment, you could carefully take the plants out of the soil and measure their roots, count their leaves, and maybe measure the thickness of the stem. What kind of liquids are you thinking of using?