• Project overview

The goal of this project is to build an aquaponics system to grow healthy plants and keep the fish’s water hygienic. The higher quality water, devoid of fertilizer and pesticides, will result in healthier plants. Aquaponics systems are much more effective at growing healthy plants. The plants that will be grown will be taller. The plants are mint plants, chosen because they grow in many situations, are used for aesthetic appeal in many dishes, and are hardy.  It is easy to measure Mint pants height, which will improve the experiments accuracy.

• Why your research matters?

In America, forty percent of all food produced is never eaten, instead of being thrown away to rot in landfills. This wastage of food contributes to a massive loss in profit for grocery stores and a wastage of the water used to grow crops, causing irreparable damage to the environment. Over the past few weeks, the author and three other students conducted an experiment to determine if plants grown using aquaponics are less likely to have blemishes, resulting in a reduction of food and water wastage, as blemished food cannot be used in restaurants.

 

The rationale for conducting this experiment lies in the fact that soil can contain impurities that can compromise the integrity of a plant, resulting in dark and unappetizing spots on the leaves of the plant, making them unsuitable for restaurant use. As aquaponics forgoes soil, these impurities are no longer present, meaning more of the plants grown in aquaponics can be brought to market than conventional plants, canceling out some of the costs that have kept aquaponics from entering most people kitchens.

 

Aquaponics are already known to massively reduce water consumption directly, but if the plants grown using aquaponics are thrown away less, then the water used to produce them does not go to waste. This makes aquaponics ideal in a world in which water is increasingly growing scarce- when water prices skyrocket, the traditional farms will be hit the hardest. Therefore, developing aquaponics now is crucial to maintaining our society in the near future.

 

When going to a restaurant, customers expect a dish to be cosmetically perfect; blemishes on herbs are unacceptable, causing blemished food to be thrown away at expense to the restaurant- if the food doesn't blemish, less money is wasted. This increases profit, potentially saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year.

• What would you do differently

I would change the plant we used for the experiment and how we conducted it, to be much more efficient.

• Math Question

Why comparing averages is not enough?

 

Comparing averages is just plain inaccurate; if you flipped a coin three times, you would have one of four possibilities: heads heads heads, tails tails tails, heads tails tails, tails heads heads. This does not mean that there is a one hundred percent chance you get heads/tails (for the first two flips), or a 66.66% chance that you get the others. Chi-squared allows us to determine the likelihood of the null hypothesis is correct for a given set of data.

 

Comparing averages does not account for probabilities, only accounting for the observed data. Chi-squared shows how far the data is from the expected data, as opposed to only looking at what averaged higher. In a test in which the results are very unusual, the averages may not reflect how strange the results are; chi-squared allows for one to see if data is truly strange.