Year 12 EEI's

[MoN]

Hi I'm a senior in grade 12 and I do the three major and best sciences (Chem, Physics and Biology)

 

This year one of our forms of assessment for each is an EEI (Extended Experimental Investigation) and I want some ideas so I can make a start to them (Starting Biology early gives me plenty of time for plants to grow, or for the effects to become distinct and conclusive)

 

I'm looking for EEI's to do for all sciences and I like to do experiments that have a good amount of prac work, because just theoretical research gets a bit boring.

 

For physics I was thinking of making an Air Cannon (testing barrel length, distance travelled/pressure etc) or a Water Rocket (pressure vs height etc)

 

I value input from others - ie. other exciting experiments or methods for those which make life easier

 

For biology I did an experiment last year looking at the effect of pH levels in the soil and the germination of two different plant species (snowpeas and marigolds), something like that would be alright i guess

 

Thank you all, and i apologise for the size of this post

[hypervalent_iodine]

Well, I know MoN won't need this anymore as they will have finished year 12, but I thought I might respond anyway. Judging by the fact that MoN mentioned EEI's, I can gather that he/she did his senior high school years in QLD, Australia, which just happens to be where I graduated from high school. So for the benefit of other students who are looking for some good EEI's to do, here is a list of the ones I did in Chemistry and Biology. I received no less than an A grade on all of these, so provided you put the work in and things haven't changed too much in 5 years, you should be on the right track:

 

Chemistry

 

Reaction kinetics and mechanisms using the Landolt clock reaction (aka iodine clock reaction).

 

The concept behind this can be a littlle bit to get your head around when . This was quite a simple experiment, but there is a fair amount of maths involved in calculating all of the initial rates, etc. You only need very access to relatively simple and safe chemicals too, depending on what variation you use. I found an interactive version of the experiment that would be a great help in developing some sort of protocol: interactive clock reaction

 

Also, if your teachers have access to the Journal of Chemical Education I know that there are a number of articles that list procedures as well as detailing other bits of very helpful information.

 

The main thing with this as an assignment is to demonstrate a sound understanding of how to interpret and properly analyse kinetic data. From this experiment, you should be able to interpret initial rates, the reaction rate constant (k) and the order of your reactants/reaction.

 

Biology

The affect of light and sucrose on the growth and development of plants

I'm not sure if this one is particularly useful to most high school student's the way that I did it, since my school was one of only a few that I know of with a dedicated plant tissue culture lab. In any case, the experiment that I was required to do involved investigating two parameters, light and sucrose availability, and how those changed the growth and development of plants. It's a simple enough thing to do if you have the proper labs, so a lot of the work comes from how in depth you scientifically justify your results. For instance, we found that plants growing with sucrose but without light still grew - in fact, they grew significantly taller than those that had light - but the had next to no leaf or root growth. Phenomena like that clearly need some in depth explaining to gain good marks. It is also worth while to try and analyse the quantitative data with proper statistical measures. If you wanted to go hard out with the stats analysis, you might do a Welch two-tailed t-test and an F-test. If you have a PTC lab, then presumably this is something you will be doing anyway and you will have a protocol for it. Alternatively, you could do a similar experiment growing plants in soil under abiotically controlled conditions as MoN suggested. I did one looking at soil salinity and a few other factors once that worked quite well as an assignment. Other than that you could possibly look at antibiotic resistance in bacteria such as E coli, if your school allows it.