Mission to Mars
I am so excited for this project! Thanks to a fantastic partnership with my science-teacher soulmate, Amanda Green from Ecole Coloniale Estates from Black Gold Regional School Division, we have received a Science Giants grant from Devon Energy to purchase supplies for a Martian Garden. The Martian Garden is a company that has developed Mars Simulant Soil that we will use in conjunction with the Tomatosphere project to test how to best grow plants on Mars. We will also be using this Mission as a focus for science 9 all year - bringing in concepts from each unit to come up with solutions for the many challenges that travelling to Mars will entail! Keep watching this page for all of the exciting developments!
Planning Documents and Templates:
Martian Garden & Tomatosphere:
How will we get our energy in the long journey to Mars? Can we grow crops on Mars or at least use Martian Soil to grow them in our habitats? These are some of the questions we are trying to answer with our Martian Garden and Tomatosphere components of our project.
What is Tomatosphere?
Tomatosphere is an educational outreach project that reaches over 17 000 classrooms across Canada and the United States. Each classroom will receive two sets of seeds, one is a “control” and one is a “test” set. The purpose is to see if there are any measurable differences in germination rate between the “test tomatoes” and the control group. We will not know which is the test set until we submit our results in several weeks, although one set of seeds did spend 6 months on the International Space Station last year!
Students will plant an “G” plant and a “H” plant. We will compile all data as a student body in order to analyse a larger sample size. Plants will grow in our classroom throughout the school year, lending to many other teachable moments!
Cross-Curricular Focus in Grade 9:
Always, always, ALWAYS curriculum is the focus of our activities and projects in school. In grade 9 we are starting with our Space Exploration unit because it is the most natural fit for our Mission to Mars project. I was leery of doing this because I've always started with either Chemistry or Biological Diversity but I have actually found this to be quite a fun change! Students LOVE space and the questions that are being asked are just fantastic.
We started the year by posing some questions:
How will we get to Mars?
What do we need to survive on the way there and back?
What do we need to live on the surface of Mars?
How will we get home?
These questions are also included in our Mars bulletin board:
Scientific Method:
The main reason I love taking part in the Tomatosphere project is that it provides us an authentic opportunity to review and use Scientific Method.
Students start by making a hyphothesis and defining the variables of the experiment. Then we get to plant!
I decided to make this display more open to start the year so students could fill in their ideas and add more questions as we progress through our project.
Each student was given a G seed and an H seed to plant. We did them one at a time to make sure we didn't mix them up! This year we started by planting 74 of each seed. Now we wait!
Just 5 days after planting this year we have germination! This is the fastest I have ever seen seeds germinate in all the years I have been taking part.
Each day I come in and record the number of germinated seeds so that we keep our time consistent.
Once we posed the questions, students were given strips of paper to record thoughts on. White strips for needs, coloured strips for questions or what we need to know. We will include these in our display and come back to them throughout the project.
33 Days after we planted our seeds, our experiment concluded with 68/74 seeds germinated for each G and H. Once we submitted the results to Tomatosphere we received certificates of completion and found out that the H seeds were the ones that had spent 6 weeks in space. The national average for germination was 75% for both seed types, while ours was 91% - quite a difference!
Students used the information we gathered to created graphs and write analyses (more on this in the curriculum section).
Because the plan is for this project to be a theme for the entire school year, I also wanted a place for students to have to record their thoughts and ideas about our Mission while we watched video clips, read excerpts from books, had class discussions, etc. So we created our Mission to Mars pages in our Interactive Notebooks. Every time we are doing something in class that brings up questions or thoughts relating to the project, students write them down. I love seeing the "light bulb" moments as something occurs to them and they flip their books to this page to record it.
This is how my Mission to Mars page started as a sample for students. I encourage them to use this page however it works for them - notes, sketches, questions, etc.
Our Mars display after it was populated with student questions!
The Martian Garden
After long last the big day was finally here!! It was time to transplant our Tomatosphere seedlings into our Mars and Earth soil to start the next phase of our experiment!
The logistics of this day took a little time to organise. Space and soil were the biggest limiting factors in this phase. How could we make sure we planted enough replicates to get valid data but also make sure we had space and enough soil to do so?
Then the question of how to organize 75 students over 3 classes to transplant, while keeping things consistent enough to maintain experimental integrity. I decided to have stations set up around the room with instructions at each station. I would man the seedling station to make sure the correct plants went in the correct soil and to select plants of similar height and 'health' to transplant.
Tomatosphere Data Analysis:
Once we had concluded the experiment portion of our Tomatosphere project, students were asked to create a double-line graph and write a conclusion paragraph addressing the results. This is definitely an area of development for students and we will be working together to co-create criteria around this skill.
Expert Mentorship:
One of the key ideas behind any project I have been a part of is mentorship by experts who have experiences that are related to the field we are studying. We were so fortunate to have Ross Lockwood come in to talk with our students. Ross has his PhD in Condensed Matter Physics and served as systems and communications engineer on the NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars Simulation, along with a whole slough of other fascinating and space-related experiences!
In the end, the plan was that each class would plant 20 plants:
5 G plants in Earth soil
5 H plants in Earth soil
5 G plants in Mars Simulant soil
5 H plants in Mars Simulant soil
Students volunteered to plant certain plants - it's fun for them to "name" their plant - and if there wasn't enough for each student, they paired up.
What a fun day!
Students were engaged as Ross talked about the challenges that we face as we potentially look to plan manned missions to the Red Planet. He encouraged them to think about these missions in the broader sense, rather than just 'how do we get there?'
We had hoped to connect with other specialists at the University of Alberta however there were some challenges with staff reassignments and scheduling.
The students worked so well, moving between stations and being so respectful of the process.
We have a wall full of windows in our classroom so all plants are exposed to lots of natural light each day.
In April, we took the opportunity to speak with Dan Riskin, an evolutionary biologist who happens to also host Discovery Channel's Daily Planet and Animal Planet's Monsters Inside Me, via Skype.
Dan discussed with students the kinds of problems that would have to be solved and the challenges living things would have growing on Mars. It was an inspirational conversation and got students thinking in different directions with regards to what will be needed to settle on Mars.
We have our plants in black bins so that we can water straight into the container and plants can absorb what they need. This makes it easier to control how much water we give to the plants and we can ensure they have sufficient water to make it through weekends and short breaks when I am not at school.
Bringing Focus to the Project - Social Studies & Math Join In
In April it became apparent that the starting questions to our project, while incredibly thought-provoking and relevant, made the project too massive to tackle at this stage and we needed to bring focus to what we were doing so that students could have tangible goals to accomplish.
I started by talking with my colleague who teaches Social Studies about what he could see as a potential connection for his curriculum. He felt strongly that there were authentic links to immigration, political action and charters of rights and freedoms and decided he'd like students to take the perspective of politicians vying to be the first elected leaders of Mars.
Next, we brought in our math lead teacher, with whom I have had the good fortune to work with on several cross-curricular projects. He decided the best focus for his students would be on considering scale and function to design scale-model habitats using online software.
Together, we mapped out how our showcase might look. This was our first brainstorm and it changed quite a bit, but it was what brought focus to the project for all of us.
So far we have decided to let our plants grow in the two different soils without any fertilizers to see if we notice any differences between the two.
At 1-2 week intervals students measure various aspects of plant growth, recording information for "their" plant. A class Google Sheet has been shared to record all information in one place.
Listening to my colleagues helped me to see where I could bring focus, while still utilizing Mars as a driving factor for much of my curriculum... in science, we would focus on basic needs, specifically food. A political party who hoped to be elected would have to be able to provide for its citizens since they would not be taking over an already established civilization. I also wanted to use the 'bones' of a previous project I had been a part of, Sharks Bio-Lab, because it had been a fantastic vehicle for learning about Biological Diversity. We would use what we had learned through our Tomatosphere and Martian Garden experiments to fuel research into how to grow plants (Dan Riskin had strongly suggested that a new civilization would likely need to at least start with a plant-based diet) and how to genetically modify existing edible plant species to help them be more likely to survive on Mars.
Welcome to Mars - Our Historic Election Day!
Finally, at long last, we were ready for our big day! Our students had worked so hard to bring all elements of their projects to fruition we were excited to see how they would set up for election day.
For our part, we wanted to be sure that our audience would be well informed about what had gone into the project and so we had a welcome poster and pamphlet as people entered the showcase venue. I also had on
display the literature that students had had access to throughout the year. Some of it was used for read alouds, others were there merely to pique curiosity on the subject and still others were used for research and inspiration.
So far, while we have not taken a lot of quantitative measurements, students have made some qualitative observations. For example, many of the plants growing in Mars Simulant soil have a red hue to their stems when compared to the plants in the Earth soil. Also, for all 3 classes, plants growing in Earth soil appear to be taller and "healthier" than their Mars simulant counterparts. We will continue to track this into the new year when we will introduce fertilizers to the soils for two classes, keeping the third class as a control.
Enhancing Mars Regolith
While we had intended to keep one class' plants as a control set, we realized that we had shown, beyond a doubt, that Mars regolith on its own was not sufficient to support plant growth long term. Our plants grown in regolith were 'left behind' quite clearly as the plants growing in Earth soil grew so tall we had to stop using this as a responding variable. So, as all good scientists do, we changed course based on the results of our experiments.
It was wonderful to see how the different political parties had decided to showcase their platforms. All groups had a scientific research poster outlining the processes behind what genetic modifications they would make to a plant they would bring, in addition to party logos and pamphlets to hand out to audience members.
We decided to transplant all of our plants from 4" pots and, in the process, add one of 3 different fertillizers to them. Our fertilizers were:
- commercial sheep manure
- Jobe's fertlizer spikes (6-18-6)
- Miracle Gro Tomato Food (18-18-21)
We changed the Earth soil plants from wooden stakes to cages - this allowed them to keep growing but also allowed the stems to become stronger than when they were tied to the stakes.
Finally, inspired by our class read-aloud from The Martian, we added some mixed soil plants - combining Mars regolith with Earth soil and no other fertilizers.
Plants continued to be watered on a regular basis and students measured Green Scale and stem diameter. This is an area that we did 'fall off' of as things picked up in our classroom. It was quite clear qualitatively that there were different affects, but we did not measure quantitative results as often as we should have and we stopped after a while. This is an area for improvement should we take this on again!
Final Results!
Throughout the spring months our plants began to flower and fruit - including some of our Mars regolith plants! Students had a chance to taste tomatoes grown from the plants and the rest of the fruit was collected and made into Space Tomato Salsa for our Mars Colonization Showcase.
While we did not conclude with quantitative data, the qualitative results were quite clear. Mars regolith mixed with Earth soil was by far the most successful combination, which tells us how valuable our Earth soil could be to a colonization effort on Mars.
The next most successful fertilizers were the spikes, followed closely by the fertilizer solution. Plants grown in regolith supplemented solely by commercial sheep manure did not grow well, telling us that to be successful on Mars we would need to go beyond the Mark Watney method in The Martian movie.
Our Space Tomato Salsa was out of this world!
Because part of their platforms were also to provide shelter for their citizens, parties had their 3D printed scale models for their habitat designs on display to show how they would provide this basic need. We were very grateful to our Strembitsky Parent Foundation for their support in purchasing a 3D printer for our school and to Imagination Technologies for helping print some of our models as we were in a time crunch right before the showcase.
Students used Tinkercad to design their scale models, keeping in mind functionality and the potential to increase space for more citizens over time.
At one point in the afternoon we had an all party forum where the party leaders were asked questions from the audience and they had a set time to respond. This was definitely one of my favorite parts of the day! We ended up with quite a large crowd of students and community members present to see the question period and it was a tremendous opportunity for students to practice valuable public speaking skills.
Finally, all attendees of our showcase were asked to vote for the party that they best felt would be successful in leading and governing a new human civilization on Mars. What a fantastic way to see how our students had managed to convey their knowledge and understanding!
What Next?
Any scientist knows that experimental design does not end with the results, but instead with more questions. Now that we have tested fertilizers, what would be the next phase for us to tackle? Some questions that have arisen are:
- is there an optimal amount of fertilizer to add?
- what if we added fertilizer to the mixed soils?
- should we measure the amount of fruit formed?
- what if we grew plants with grow lights instead of sunlight?
- can we successfully grow plants using hydroponics? is it as efficient?
- are there any nutrients left in the soil from the plants?
- what if we add bacteria to the regolith?
I love that there are so many different directions that we can still go and I am so looking forward to testing some of these questions in future years!
Helpful Links:
These are some links to valid, reliable and relevant websites, articles and activities that you will find useful throughout this year.