In December the TY students competed in a SciFest@Schools competition with their Scratch coding projects. In January they competed in a second SciFest@Schools competition with Science projects organised by Mr. Fennell and Ms. O'Sullivan. The winning project by Lauren, Rebecca and Grace was to test if a genre of music influenced the growth of a plant. Find out the results by reading on!
On Thursday, 19th January, three judges came to visit the school to see the TY Science projects exhibited in the hall. There were a wide variety of projects on show which were really well displayed by the TY students. The winning project, "to test if a genre of music influenced the growth of a plant" (it does!) was by Grace, Lauren and Rebecca.
Lauren explains further, "our findings included the discovery that music alone does impact growth. We decided to expand our work to see if a genre effect plant growth. The genres were classical music and rock music. We played three hours of classical music a day to our sweetpea plant; three hours of rock music a day and no music to our control plant. Why only three hours? Because we found that any longer and the stigmata was forced open which would have affected the transpiration and ultimately stunt the natural growing process. Our results found that our sweet pea plant grew quicker to classical music. How does music affect the growth of the plants? The vibrations in the soil stimulated growth."
In May the winners will compete at the next level of SciFest - the Colleges level in the IT in Blanchardstown.
Thanks to Mr. Fennell, Ms O'Sullivan and the three SciFest judges.
[Video: www.youtube.com]
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