Blog 4: Experimental Design

We have recently altered our experiment's design because we discovered that it is quite challenging to keep milkweed alive in our classroom! So we are still going to perform an experiment that will coordinate with our hypotheses but in a slightly different way. What we have decided to do is keep the milkweed outside in their natural "habitat" in order to carry out our experiment. During yesterday's class, we went outside and flagged ten plants using two different colors. To keep water as a variable in this experiment, we are going to water either the orange or yellow flagged plants (undecided still as to which one) for ten days straight, giving them four cups of water each day. After the ten days, we are going to go outside and measure each individual leaf that we are testing and see how much sap seeps out within fifteen seconds. Then we will graph our data and analyze it so determine whether it determines one or all of our hypotheses. My hypothesis is that the bigger the leaf, the more sap will come out, and the extra water will not affect how much sap is in the plant. It most likely will ran within the ten day period of our experiment, and we will have to consider that the plants we are not watering are still getting water but naturally. Even if it does rain, we will still water the plants we have decided to water so that they will still be getting more water than the other plants. We are going to start this experiment this Monday (9/15).