Mini Experiment: Mung Bean vs Corn
Purpose of the Experiment: The main reason behind this small experiment is to see if you identify seeds even when they haven't sprouted up or grown roots and we can characteriz them just by their phiyscal apperence. Usually you can only catagorize a seed or plant after their roots have grown in, or seen sprouting. We learned over the course of a couple days that one of them would be a monocot or a dicot.
Predictions
I predicted that the corn was the corn was the monocot, and the mung bean was a dicot. I noticed on the first day that the corn seed had a tough outer shell because you could see the other smaller seed inside. While the mung bean was just a big old seed. I also noticed that it looked like the mung bean split evenly while the corn just exploded.
Observations
Over the timeline, I noticed that the mung bean was growing significantly more than the corn ever did. Unfortunately the last week of the experiment I lost my plants, and I never got to see the results, mostly because I had no idea that my plants were even still alive. The mung bean grew so much that it had leaves and big long roots coming out of it while the corn was still in its seed shell. I sadly enough never got to see it appear.
Findings
After the experiment was finished, I concluded that my prediction was correct in the fact that corn was the monocot and the mung bean was indeed the dicot. When I started to look at how the roots were growing out of the mung bean, I noticed a very important that the sources, that is it's a tap root versus the corn seed did not have tap roots. Taproot are a characteristic of a dicot. Another thing that I noticed is that the corn seed only had one cotyledon while the mung bean had two. Therefore the corn is a monocot while the mung bean is a dicot.
Photosynthesis Interactive Lab
Purpose of the experiment
The main reason for this project was to find out how Photosynthesis worked and how it can change over the course of time. What I got out of the experiment was that it takes a heck of a long time to have a plant produce energy and food. The process its self is interesting and complex. The Calvin cycle played a big part in this experiment with that being the pure focus.
Results
The results that I found where that it takes a hell of a long time to get the leaf disks to successfully float to the top of the surface to the light. It took a total of 40 minutes for all 6 of the willow leaves to reach for the sunlight. The pattern is every 10 minutes one leave would join another and so forth. I used natural light instead of purple light because I thought the leaf disks would be more immune to the "sunlight" than a different colored light.
Plant Mania
My experiment was about to see if U.V. light would grow veggies faster than regular white light.
We choose light because we were curious to see the effect that different colored light has on plants. UV light was an option because we studied that plants could grow faster underneath Ultraviolet light versus white light. If our plants had grown, we would have predicted that the ultraviolet would have developed the plants a lot faster than the white light would not have. This experiment would have applied to the real world because it would have shown us that we can grow crops inside that cannot thrive in certain types of seasons. Since carrots are typically grown in midsummer and lettuce during spring and fall, it can be tough to grow them during winter.
Things we could have done better would be:
We choose light because we were curious to see the effect that different colored light has on plants. UV light was an option because we studied that plants could grow faster underneath Ultraviolet light versus white light. If our plants had grown, we would have predicted that the ultraviolet would have developed the plants a lot faster than the white light would not have. This experiment would have applied to the real world because it would have shown us that we can grow crops inside that cannot thrive in certain types of seasons. Since carrots are typically grown in midsummer and lettuce during spring and fall, it can be tough to grow them during winter.
Things we could have done better would be:
- Watered them more consistently
- No heating pad needed
- Taken it home over break
- Further distance lights from plants
The math question that we answered was what methods could have impacted our results in a postive way?
During our experiment, we did countless things that went right. We separated our carrots from our lettuce seeds and watered them all equally. Our variables to both of these plants were the same. They both got U.V. light and normal white light. Some methods that did not allow for productive data collection were we first intended to have a daily schedule to water the plants every day twice a day, once during the morning time, and once in the afternoon. We also found that the heating pad was not necessary and the lights were too close to the plants. We believe that the plants also did not grow due to overexposed heat that would dry up our plants faster in shorter amounts of time.