biology IA idea: colour change in flower petals

[mawinnie]

So im in my junior year and my teacher advised me to start thinking of an IA topic early. I thought of observing the colour changes in white flower petals (when mixing food colouring with water) but then i realized thats more of a qualitative experiment. Could anyone help in trying to put a quantitative aspect to it??

I’m generally interested in the topic of plants and water. My teacher also said using a database is good because you usually have direct personal engagement, so that’s another option.

 

Help is appreicated, thank you!

[Sleeping Dude]

Hey mawinnie! I've already finished my final biology IA just last term and I am willing to help you! I've currently gotten for my 4 practise IAs for biology full marks or one below because I knew what I had to do. The topic that you are trying to investigate the most likely transpiration rates in chapter 9? Firstly, this is a HL topic and if your teacher already covered this in class, then go for it. At my school, IAs that received a high mark were enzymes and factors that affect it (temperature, concentration, pH. Temperature and pH is the one of the easier and better factors than concentration) as good IAs should have background information (using idea of enzymes - the enzyme itself, the purpose and significance of enzyme and why your  investigation is important), be able to produce a graph that can be heavily evaluated (normally these are scatter graphs, as you can see R value, trends of going up and down, systematic and random errors in data, and generally connects everything that you are doing) as well as qualitative data (such as discolouration of enzymes or the denaturation of enzymes, weird colour or appearance of the product of the experiment to say how the quantitative results are supported or gone against by your experiment) and being able to produce lots of trials (my IA took 30 minutes per trial and I had to do in total 35 trials in 2 weeks, which I had to stay back and come early to school to finish the experiments). I'm not sure about your topic about plants and water as this wasn't my final one, but my practise IA on fertiliser and beans and how the height was affected by the nitrogen or flouride based fertilisers and organic versus inorganic fertilisers scored full marks so maybe you could do something like this with plants? People who did this for their final however had problems such as beans not growing at all or they grow fungus, but if you manage this, the topic is still good. Sorry I can't help much with your idea, but hopefully someone else will come along!

[mawinnie]

Thanks for your reply, we've covered chapter 9 but I feel like anything I'll do from there will be too cliche since my teacher has mentioned how so many people have already done analysis of enzyme activity and reactions. I could resort to that as my last option but he'll probably think I got that online so I'm trying to come up with something original (which isn't going great lol). 

For your experiment, were you just using different fertilisers as your independent variable? What chapter would that relate to? 

[Sleeping Dude]

Woah, I am very sorry that I haven't received a notification on your question. Referring to your question on fertilizers, this was a practise assignment so I am not entirely sure that this is a good idea to base your real IA on as I can't see what topic that does come from. If you are/were interested in this, you should ask your teacher.