Plants and what they need to grow: our findings

We conducted our experiment over 21 days and during that period we measured the height of our seedlings every week to see how their growth was affected by the different level of water, light, air, soil, space and warmth.

Each group took 3 measurements and then drew bar charts to show the results in a more easily identifiable form.

This group looked at how warmth, or the lack of it, affected the growth of the plants:

You can clearly see in the graph below that on the final week of the experiment the plant with no warmth grew least and the plant with most warmth grew most.

The next group looked at the importance of air.

These findings show that by day 21 lack of air has adversely affected the seedling whereas the seedling with the most air has grown the tallest.

The following group looked at water.

These findings show that the seedling without water had shrunk in size by day 21 but the seedling with plenty of water - perhaps too much, had grown by day 21 but not as much as the seedling with only some water.

Our scientific approach clearly showed how the plants were affected and our bar charts were very helpful in showing the results in an easily understandable way.

We had an interesting discussion about this in class and also about the difficulties in conducting experiments in a scientific manner. For example, the seedling with no warmth was stored in the fridge - but this meant that it was also without light. Did this affect the results? Something to think about.