Creating this thread as a place to gather my ‘favorite’ labs from agriscience education.
11-12th Grade Advanced Plant Science Course. I believe this was created by ‘Arkansas Ready for Learning’ but is being used in Georgia - if I’m not mistaken. Here is a link to the entire Google Drive folder and here is a link to a document with an overview of the curriculum. I will also share an example of one lesson below - that taught me quite a bit actually!
Lesson 6: Forcing Plants
Essential Question: What is plant forcing?
Georgia Performance Standards: AG-PSB-5-(m, n)
Academic Standards: SCSh2, SCSh4, SB1, SCSh6
Teaching Time:
- Classroom: 1 hour
- Laboratory: 6 weeks
Objectives:
- Define forcing.
- List examples of forcing.
- Identify why forcing is important to the greenhouse
industry. - Identify how plants are forced.
- Identify commonly forced plants in the greenhouse
industry.
So if you’re like me, by this point you’re probably thinking - what the heck is forcing??? - well here’s the definition:
Forcing: the production of a plant that is grown and marketed out of season by manipulating the environmental conditions, such as light or temperature.
Unfortunately, all of the examples of forcing in agriculture assumed access to a controlled environment - like a greenhouse with temperature control - or at least automated irrigation. Now that I knew what Forcing was I wanted to try it so I went to the ‘Recipe Builder GPT’ - which you can learn more about on this thread What does a MARSfarm recipe do? What is JSON? (ChatGPT-4 Response) - and had the following conversation:
Then I went on to have it generate a table for me to make it faster to identify plants that could be grown in an MV1 to demonstrate these forcing methods:
By this point I wanted to start moving towards an actual ‘recipe’ for the MV1:
I then saw the need to maintain a ‘control’ for these experiments - so that the different outcomes could be observed. So I had GPT draft an actual lesson plan/lab:
Now I was ready to put it all together - so I chose to focus in on just poinsettas so it would be able to add back in the layer of complexity from before that pertained to specific recipe settings:
Lastly, now satisfied that this would be a good lab for someone like @jodlowskik to use - assuming they had four MV1s, I was ready for it to actually create the recipes for me.
- MV1 Device 1: Standard short-day treatment to induce flowering.
- MV1 Device 2: A more stringent short-day regime to see if there’s an enhanced response.
- MV1 Device 3: Introducing supplemental red light to test the effect on flowering in short-day conditions.
- MV1 Device 4: A control group that follows the natural seasonal photoperiod to contrast against the forced conditions.
Lastly, it was time to start exporting the JSON recipe to actually use on an MV1!
