Over the last few weeks in science we have been working on a super fun and interesting project that involves grouping up and cloning different plants with different methods and seeing how, if, why and why not they grow. At the end of the project we had to make a research video to demonstrate our learning and show the progress of the plants that we cloned. 

Way back in the beginning of the project we had to do lots of textbook work and research by watching videos and searching the web. This was because we needed to start with an in depth understanding of the topic otherwise we wouldn’t be able to learn anything from the project and how the clones acted. This lasted for a week or so and before we knew it we were cloning experts. After this part of the project we were ready to go and clone some plants. 

First things first we had to make groups. I made a group with Alivia W, Luca OG and Luca J. The first thing we did was go outside and find some healthy dandelion plants.  We then cut the roots properly to make a separate section of roots that when planted would grow. We planted 4 dandelion root sections and we got 2 to grow which is a really decent result. The dandelion plant was chosen by the class but now our group got to choose our own plant. We chose garlic because it had some interesting properties (like growing in cloves and sprouting fast) and we heard it wasn’t supposed to be very difficult to grow. What we heard was right because all four of our test clones grew fast and grew strong. 

The next stage of the project was to document our research by modeling a video after a real laboratory research video. These videos are used in real life in hopes of getting grants for people to further their research. We pretended we also wanted a grant and our (not real) goal was 750’000$ to sexually (regular plant reproduction) produce more garlic anstead of asexually (cloning). Our video is here.

 

Looking back on this project I though it was really fun and I learned a surprising amount about how cloning works and how things reproduce in general. If I could change one thing about this project I would make it more focused on th video aspect so we could improve our skills more in different areas. One thing I think this project did well was really in depth, teaching us the information we need to know about this topic and everything to do with it.