SEGA's Planting Science Program
It’s planting time at SEGA. This year, 45 Form 1 students are participating in the Planting Science Program. The program is designed to teach girls the scientific method and the building blocks of how to perform a controlled scientific experiment, how to develop hypotheses, and how to determine independent and dependent variables, and set up an experiment.
According to UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics, less than 30 percent of researchers around the world are women. To this day, there remain large gender gaps in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), many girls are not represented in these fields by the time they reach adolescence. The future of work, the jobs of tomorrow, will be in technology and innovation. At SEGA, we are sowing the seeds of STEM education with fun, hands-on experiences.
To carry out the seed growth experiments, SEGA students are split into groups of four and each group identified a hypothesis and their dependent and independent variables. Students put the soil in their recycled fruit juice cups and measured the appropriate depth for planting their seeds using their finger and a ruler.
Group 1 is testing the effect of sunlight on growth. They planted either radish or maize seeds in two cups and have placed one cup in the sun and one cup in the shade. Group 2 is testing the effect of soil quality on growth and have planted either radish or maize seeds in two cups and have put normal soil in one cup and in the other cup amended soil (added materials that improve the permeability and water retention characteristics of soil). Group 3 planted either radish or maize seeds in two cups-- in one cup, they planted two seeds on top of each other, and in the other cup, they planted the seeds with lots of distance between them in order to test the effect of seeds spacing on growth. Group 4 tested the effect of cotyledon clipping on plant growth. Groups studying this topic have planted either radish or maize seeds in two cups and as soon as the seeds start to sprout, students will cut one cotyledon off and leave the seeds in the second cup intact as a comparison.
For safekeeping, students placed their seeds next to the chicken coop in a sunny area (except for the cups that are kept in a dark area to test for effects of sunlight). One girl from each group is responsible for watering their plants once a day (when there is no rain).
After a few weeks SEGA teachers will guide the students on how to measure their results and draw conclusions from their data. We can’t wait to see what the experiments yield and what the students discover!
