No battery for the clock? Try fruit
DID you know that lime can be used to generate electricity -- and that jazz, of all music, helps plants grow the fastest?
These fascinating results were what secondary school students discovered while participating in Republic Polytechnic's (RP) Scientific Thinking Programme (STP).
The programme had teams of three to five students and one teacher take part in six months' worth of workshops and clinics, with advisers from RP helping them with their experiments. A record 34 teams from 20 schools, involving 138 students and 30 teachers, took part this year.
Four experiments received an “outstanding project" mention. One was a team from Evergreen Secondary School, whose students Lee Wen Jing, Chua Cheng En and Liyanto Sudarso used fruit to power a clock.
“We imagined ourselves stranded in a jungle with no electricity, and we tried to use fruit that we could find in a jungle," said Wen Jing. The Secondary 3 students found that citrus fruit worked best because the acid acts as an electrolyte when a strip of copper and a strip of iron were placed in the juice.
Also receiving outstanding mention was Holy Innocents' High School's experiment to investigate the effect of music on green bean plants. They played rock, pop, classical and jazz music, and found that classical music worked best in helping a plant germinate, but jazz made the plants grow the fastest.
Said team member Wong Ming Hui: “We learnt to motivate each other. During the June holidays, practically every day we had to go back to water the plants and tabulate the results." -- Tan Hwee Hwee Copyright MediaCorp Press Ltd. All rights reserved.
DID you know that lime can be used to generate electricity -- and that jazz, of all music, helps plants grow the fastest?
These fascinating results were what secondary school students discovered while participating in Republic Polytechnic's (RP) Scientific Thinking Programme (STP).
The programme had teams of three to five students and one teacher take part in six months' worth of workshops and clinics, with advisers from RP helping them with their experiments. A record 34 teams from 20 schools, involving 138 students and 30 teachers, took part this year.
Four experiments received an “outstanding project" mention. One was a team from Evergreen Secondary School, whose students Lee Wen Jing, Chua Cheng En and Liyanto Sudarso used fruit to power a clock.
“We imagined ourselves stranded in a jungle with no electricity, and we tried to use fruit that we could find in a jungle," said Wen Jing. The Secondary 3 students found that citrus fruit worked best because the acid acts as an electrolyte when a strip of copper and a strip of iron were placed in the juice.
Also receiving outstanding mention was Holy Innocents' High School's experiment to investigate the effect of music on green bean plants. They played rock, pop, classical and jazz music, and found that classical music worked best in helping a plant germinate, but jazz made the plants grow the fastest.
Said team member Wong Ming Hui: “We learnt to motivate each other. During the June holidays, practically every day we had to go back to water the plants and tabulate the results." -- Tan Hwee Hwee Copyright MediaCorp Press Ltd. All rights reserved.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
