This week, we finished our Clean It Up! project. We had to experiment. After we decided what chemical substance we were going to use, and how our spill happened, we had to pretend to be scientists and experiment on some plants. Since our substance was an acid, we decided to use our knowledge of neutralizing chemicals to fix our chemical spill. If you don’t remember what neutralizing is, there’s a brief recap:
Mixing an acid and a base together is the action of neutralizing. No matter what you add together, the result will ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS be salt and water.
Okay. As I was saying, we were going to attempt neutralizing. First off, when you want to neutralize something, you should have everything handy. So we decided that we would use baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) as our base.
Before we got started, we needed to write up a lab report explaining our Introduction (how we came upon the spill), the hypothesis (which explained what we thought worked and why. We’ll get into that in a sec.), our materials needed, our procedure, the data of the experiment, and the conclusions we can make from the data.
Number One: Introduction. We decided to do lemon juice because we were all quite familiar with it and we thought it would be easy.
Two: Hypothesis. We thought that adding baking soda to the lemon juice and water on the plant was going to be easy, since we just needed to add some. We expected the baking soda to neutralize the lemon juice and save the plant.
Next, we had the materials as shown below:
- We will need sodium bicarbonate (baking soda),
- H2O (water)
- citric acid from the lemon juice
- four plants we will be testing on
- a tub to catch the mess
- a graduated cylinder to measure our substances
- measuring spoons
- cup to mix up the baking soda solution
Next we had our procedure: Firstly, we will label the plants ‘Plant 1, Plant 2, Plant 3, and Plant 4’. This is to ensure that we do not get mixed up and pour the wrong substances on the wrong plants. Secondly, we will mix up the baking soda solution. We need 125 mL on Plant 3 and 175 mL on Plant 4. DO NOT ADD THE SOLUTION TO THE PLANTS YET. Then we will add 100 mL of water to each plant. We need exactly 100 mL for each, otherwise the experiment will not work. Next, on every plant except for plant 1, we will add 100 mL of lemon juice. Do this step AFTER you have added the water to the plants. Next, we leave plants 1 and 2 alone and add 125 mL to plant 3 and 175 mL to plant 4. Make sure your measurements are exact, otherwise your experiment will be a dud. You need all of these things precise. Finally, let the plants sit in varying amounts of time. If you touch them, or add stuff to them, your experiment will be a dud. So be careful.
⚠WARNING! The plants might die. Keep this in mind. If they are dying, either wreck the experiment and save them, or let them die and keep your experiment perfect. It’s up to you.
Next, the data. The plants were okay. The solution we tried to save them with did more harm than good, so the spill was not as bad as we had first anticipated. Plant 1, to which there was just water, was strong and healthy. Plant two was weaker, having just the juice, but not bad. Plant three had water, juice, and 125 mL of baking soda solution. It was quite weak, but not dead. Plant four we added water, juice, and 175 mL of solution. Plant four was the weakest, but still it did not die. The town has hope.
As the scientists concluded, ‘Our testing may have done more harm than good’. The plants with our attempts to save them were the closest ones to dying. The scientists say that within a few days, the lemon juice should have completely receded and within another few days, the town should be better. As we conclude, our actions have done more harm than good for the town. The spill was not as bad as we thought, and the town should make a quick recovery. We have learned that plants do not really survive when you try to neutralize them. Maybe another substance would’ve worked better.
Backward Looking: In what ways do you think you need to improve?
I think that I could’ve been more prepared. When it was time for us to start testing, we hadn’t finished the lab report. I could’ve been more prepared for the testing, and for the final newscast presentation.
Inward Looking: How do you feel about this piece of work? What parts of it do you particularly like? Dislike? Why? What did/do you enjoy about this piece or work?
I feel quite proud about this piece of work. I liked the project; it was quite fun. I went through a lot to produce it. I liked that we got to write newspapers, and I love to write, so that was especially fun for me. I disliked that we didn’t have enough time to do a newscast and that we had to do an article instead. That was a little disappointing. I really enjoyed working with my team to create the article on our knowledge.
Outward Looking: What the one thing you particularly want people to notice when they look at your work?
I want people to notice how hard I worked on this piece. I feel like if they didn’t notice that, then I would feel a little worthless. But I really worked hard at it, and I would feel quite proud to have someone notice my hard effort at this.
Forward Looking: What would you change if you had a chance to do this piece over again?
If I could redo this, I would have been extremely prepared for the tasks at hand. I feel like I could’ve been better about that, especially since our work at the end was not quite our best. But I would totally put my all into it and not waste a second If I could redo it.
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