Group 4 project ideas?

[Programthehead]

We just got our group 4 assignment and teams today. The topic that we were given was leaves. I've been trying to think up some ideas for an experiment to conduct around this subject. I don't know how far I should stray away from it since it's pretty broad. I've been thinking of things like using leaves/the plant's seeds as a bioassay medium, some how testing different things with the soil and relating it to how the leaves grow and etc (I don't know. This is my first year in chemistry and I was thrown into IB chem...so sorry if I seem like I don't know what I'm talking about ha). I also have to keep in mind that while we're forming this experiment/our question and such, we will have about a month to gather all our materials and plan things, but then we will be taking a field trip for one day only in order to test out our experiment. So I don't think we could create something that is going to require an extensive amount of time to research. I know that these projects are based a lot around how well you work with your group, but I do want to have a decent project so we don't look like fools when presenting it to the rest of the faculty!!

So if anyone could offer any "kick-starter" ideas or suggestions that could help get me moving, that would be greatly appreciated!

[kesha]

I don't know if this is too late or not, but another group that I know of did leaves as their topics and from a chemistry standpoint, they saw the different pigments that make up leaf color through extracting the pigment and then doing a chromotography test on it. And they used a spectrometer to see which wavelenght was reflected (i.e. find out the exact color of the pigment) in addition to the chromotography test.

Hope that helps

but of course, this is simple because we only had 4 days to plan everything, get the data, and make the report.

Edited September 20, 2012 by kesha