Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Idea Saved!

I asked Ms. Zhang last week (I am lazy and don't keep my blog updated that often - but I'll try!!), she said that we don't have to do something that no one has ever done before. So, I can have my experiment on colour spectrum and plant growth underway.

But setting it up can be a little bit of trouble - I would need an enclosed dark space, little cubicles for the plants (so different lights don't cross over each other and affect validity), many little plants, many little pots for the little plants, many light bulbs of different colours, racks or something to hold up the light bulbs, lots of wires and a lot of effort to water and observe the plants everyday. Since I'm leaning towards the lazy side of human nature (as mentioned above), so I might not end up doing this after all...

My dad gave me another idea though. He said if I can investigate whether glass (like the type found one your car windows) can block out UV radiation and whether glass thickness would affect the blockage. He got this idea because he always complained about sunburns while driving. This seems easier to test, the only thing hard to comeby might be some sort of meter that measures UV rays. Um... perhaps this can be easier?

The third idea now available is investigating the pattern of the relationship between the vibration frequence of metal ruler and the length used to vibrate. Is that easy to understand? Like when you hold one end of the ruler on the table and press down the other end and the ruler vibrates? I have a device that measures pitch in my instrument, so equipment would be of little problem - this is one of the main reasons I'm considering this. (Mr. Marussich actually gave me the idea - he did the ruler thing in class to explain about the stiffness of material. But he also said, "we will do this sometime"; which suggests to me that a lot of people had done this. But I really want something fresh and fun...)

I'll leave it at this now, I'll think about it more. It's actually pretty frustrating - I much prefer reading a book and learn that way. But I guess field work is ultimately more important.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Ideas!!! Ideas!!! Ideas!!!

Well, since this blog is all about the Year 10 Student Research Project, I would have to start it by having a problem to solve. Oh... This is very hard. What is an interesting, relatively easy and cheap problem for me to solve? I guess all the good ones have been done by the older generations (ah, the crime of youth).

I just got an idea today - whether different wavelength light would have an impact on the photosynthesis of plants. I know that now all light is used (or else the trees and things would be black), so... it might be a good experiement. It's also not very expensive to conduct.

But I just ran a search on Google, apparently my problem has already been solved.... (Crying face)

So now I have to go on thinking again....

Thursday, February 4, 2010

hello world

hi!! you can come check out it if you don't think it's too boring!