Project: Bean by Belinda Xu, Aubrey Sparvier, and Georgia Peever

Our question for this project is, “How do different types of communication affect the growth of a mung bean?” We think that saying nice things will help the plant and make the plant grow faster and saying negative things will make the plant grow slower while saying nothing and letting be will not do anything to the growth of the plant, because the plant that is being motivated will want to grow, and the plant that is being insulted will not want to grow.

Our plan is to place nine mung beans (phaseolus vulgaris)into separate bags. Each bean is going to be wrapped in damp paper towel. The beans will be left in a place with indirect sunlight and heat. Three of the beans will be given a motivational talk and three will be bullied, each for five minutes three times a day. The remaining three beans will be left alone. The beans will be left to grow for 14 days and they will be monitored each day. We will take pictures every other day to see the beans’ progress. As to the risks in our experiment, there is no risk in growing beans. This project is definitely more right than wrong in terms of ethics because we’re growing plants that can create food and more oxygen (even though we’re insulting some of them). There are no environmental issues, but it can have a positive effect on the environment (more oxygen).

For this experiment we need nine mung beans, two paper towels ripped into nine strips, nine ziplock bags, water, sunshine, a phone to take pictures, a tablet to write down hight, and a ruler.

Considering first peoples’ perspectives – the First Nations peoples had to grow their own food before colonization, and the crops they grew included beans and corn. The experience of growing beans gives some insight into the way that First Peoples lived before the British came in and tainted their way of life. Also, if each person grew their own food, it would be more environmentally friendly as well as more sustainable.

Our variables are the way we are talking to our beans. We are talking to some beans negatively, other beans are being talked to nicely and the other beans are being left alone.

We made 3 different graphs. Since we used three beans in each group (3 negative beans, 3 positive and 3 control), we split the graphs by taking the 1st beans of each group and put them into the first graph. The second graph is the 2nd beans from each group and the third graph is all the 3rd beans. For the height, we chose to go up by 0.5 cm at a time and we recorded their height each day. We show the different beans by using different colors. Blue for positive, red for negative and purple for the control group. We recorded the beans’ height everyday and put it into the graph. There didn’t seem to be much of a cause and effect relationship.

A confounding variable is that the beans that didn’t grow seemed to absorb more water from the paper towel, as opposed to the beans that grew better. Also, the second bean in each group (the centre graph above) did not grow very well. We cannot explain this.

From the information gathered, we can conclude that speaking negatively to plants can cause them to grow better. This may be due to the fact that plants breathe Carbon Dioxide (CO2). When angry, people often speak more forcefully, using more air. When speaking angrily to a plant, this means that the plant gets more CO2, which may make it grow better.

Our findings do not support our hypothesis. For the most part, the negative beans grew the tallest and the control beans were the smallest out of the three groups. One source of error was when there was a picture for day 2, but we then forgot to take one for day 4 so it was taken on day 5 instead. After that, all pictures were taken every other day. The beans were all treated the same way, except for how they were spoken to, yet the ones that we expected to grow best did not. The ones that we expected to sprout or grow the most did not do as well as we thought that they would. This could be considered a source of uncertainty. The quality of our data could have been improved if the independent variables had been more closely regulated, for example the amount of water given to each plant.