Here is a list of ideas we made at the beginning that we could use for our experiment
Define/Discover: We had to come up with an experiment that could be tested in microgravity. The experiment had to be able to fit inside the FME tube and can have up to 3 sections. We first brainstormed and made a list of what we were interested in testing. Then we chose what we wanted to do as our experiment. We wanted to do something with bacteria so we looked at killing and growing bacteria. We decided to go with killing bacteria. Our decision was: can rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer kill bacteria in microgravity?
Dream: If this were to work in space
This is a photo of our petri dish and it has the bacteria with the paper hole punches with hand sanitizer or rubbing alcohol on them
this could help to lead to future exploration and the astronauts possibly fight sicknesses and other bad and harmful things before they can hurt them.
Design: Our design needs to be tested on earth before being tested in microgravity to make sure that it works like we think it will. We will need to grow some bacteria and then apply rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer to see if the bacteria are killed. We should also do a control experiment to make sure that the bacteria don’t die on their own by growing more of them at same time and not applying any rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer. Results would need to be recorded so that the astronauts and scientists would know what they are looking for.
Deliver: Our experiment was to see if rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer would
kill bacteria to help prevent the astronauts from getting sick. If it helps prevent the astronauts from getting sick then it should help people on earth from getting sick too. We had a petri dish with agar and bacteria growing on top and we had rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer. We used a paper hole punch and first dipped it in rubbing alcohol and then put it on the bacteria, then we used another hole punch and covered it in the hand sanitizer and put it on the bacteria in a different spot, and last we made a combination of rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer and used another hole punch to put this combination on the bacteria. The combination of hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol worked the best for us because where we put that paper hole punch it had the least amount around of bacteria left.
Debrief: What we could do better next time is contact someone to get more information on our topic and get more information from someone with more knowledge and experience about what we are doing. In our group one of the things that was done well was our brainstorming of topics and ideas to do as our experiment. I would have liked it better if the work had been shared evenly and that everyone in our group had done their part. Overall I think it went well and I tried to contribute to the group to the best of my abilities.