LaPaz Home Learning

This is Superboy’s version of the Pumpkin Petri Dish experiment that we heard about from the evr-inspiring Dawn. It was pretty interesting. He did the experiment and wrote it up in his science journal.

Here is what Superboy wrote:

Purpose:I was doing an experiment on mold growth. I wanted to find out what was the best conditions for growing mold including wet, dry, cold, warm, light and dark.

Hypothesis: I thought that the warm, wet, and light would grow best, but I really did not know.

Methods: What I did was I got empty lemonade mix tops and I chopped up some pumpkin and put them in 8 tops. In 4 of them I put water. I put them in pairs (one wet and one dry) in different places. The places were warm and dark, warm and light, cold and dark, and finally cold and light. I added water each day to the ones that were supposed to stay wet.

Results: After a week and a half I looked at the pumpkins and I ranked them according to mold growth. This is the order they came in:

1. dark warm wet

2. light cold wet

3. dark cold dry

4. dark cold wet

5. dark warm dry

6. light cold dry

7. light warm wet

8. light warm dry

Then in order to decide which conditions were best for mold growth, I made a chart and noticed that out of the top 4 for mold growth, three were dark, three were wet, and three were cold.

Conclusion: So it seems that the most important conditions for mold growth are dark, wet, and cold. However, since the moldiest one of all was warm and not cold, I think the temperature is the least important condition of the three.

One interesting thing I noticed was on the dark warm wet pumpkin I noticed some bubbles forming in the water around the pumpkin. I think that means that it is decomposing, which is what fungus (like mold) does.

Here are some pictures of my experiment:

This is light warm dry. It had the least mold (none).

This one is light cold wet. It came in second moldiest.

This one was the winner and it was dark warm wet. Lots of mold! And you can see the bubbles in the water, too.

Here is me looking at the mold under my dissecting microscope. It looked very interesting! Some of it was white and fuzzy and some was green and slimy and some looked like a forest of trees. It also smelled bad!

The end.