Week 4

 

Blog Post Week 4

Anna Hansen and Audrey Williams

            As we begin week 4, we are almost ½ way through our summer research program. The past three weeks we have been doing lots of lit review, doing lots of calculus review, working with some data, as well as having a little fun.

            During our first week of the summer, we did lots of review of calculus concepts. It was very nice to have a refresher of all these concepts as we hadn’t taken a calculus class for over a year. We have realized how almost everything that we learned in calculus one will come in handy this summer while trying to find how much water a kidney bean needs to grow. Derivatives, antiderivatives, and differential equations are something that will be useful in this project. We can use differential equations to show rates such as transpiration, assimilation, plant mass, and soil moisture. Derivatives can also tell us about the rate of change especially when the rate of change is increasing or decreasing. Overall, we have learned that calculus one is probably one of the most important classes we have taken.

            Another very important part of what we have been doing is lots of lit review. When we read articles, we are looking for information that looks like the problem that we are trying to solve. We have found lots of articles about topics such as corn and other legume yields, how much fertilizer to use, or how much sunlight to use. We are hoping that these other articles will help us to find a similar concept to what we are doing and will be useful to us.

            Our last task that we have been working on quite often is organizing data. We received data from Chippewa Valley Bean that showed us the net bean weight in pounds as well as how many acres they planted on that year. From there we found the number of pounds that were grown on each acre. We also found data from the National Weather Station that gave us rainfall in inches from May 1^st to September 1^st which is the average growing season for a bean plant. In the future we plan to graph a scatter plot with the pounds/acre and inches of water data.

            Finally, you can’t just work all the time, you must have a little bit of fun! We ended week three with a canoe trip down the Red Cedar River. All the Lakes Reu students and mentors got into seven canoes, and we took about three hours till we took out our canoes at the Downsville boat launch. We started with a little tutorial on how to paddle, then we were off. We had only biked down the Red Cedar trail, but it was much prettier to canoe right down the middle.