Finally

After a long and stressful week I feel somewhat accomplished. On Saturday my team and I participated in the vex robotics competition, going in we set a low goal of only scoring 5 points and yet we went above and beyond scoring an average of 40 points per game. We made it to the finals against Scottsdale since we beat ASU's engineering team and also Embry riddle school of aerospace engineering. Over all we did great, got second place and we were only beat by 2 points.

On Monday I went back to ASU again to present my poster project. It was a long day but the good thing was that we only had to present for a short amount of time. Everyone that went did a great job and most people presented to 2 or more judges, I only presented to one but he asked so many questions, most unrelated to my project. All in all I'm glad I got it over with because I don't think I would be able to do it for very long. In the end it all worked out pretty nice, except when I found out my laptop broke which was horrible :(. Hopefully I get it replaced in the next couple of weeks so I can be able to do my work.

Now it's time to start a new project which I have somewhat started already. I will be working with submersibles to try and collect data from the bottom of a lake or pond. This next project is going to be an interesting one.

Busy week

This week has been a stressful week because of everything we had to complete for the ASU conference. The poster that was for the ASU conference was completed on time and it looks pretty good, well it looks pretty good to me at least. Also this week has been a crunch time for robotics since the week before the robot wasn't working properly after all the alterations it had, I spent a good amount of time trying to fix it and get ready for the competition this weekend on Saturday also at ASU. I feel good about the competition we have a functioning robot well we have 1 out of 2 functioning robots, and it looks like it's going to do well. I spent a lot of time helping individuals both in robotics, and lab. I helped a good amount of people that were still working on their poster as well as helping them upload them to dropbox since a lot of the interns hadn't used it before.

This week end, and next week are going to take up a lot of time. On Saturday the the vex robotics competition is going to take place at ASU, and after that I will be attending an open house on campus. On Monday the 4th I will be heading back to ASU to attend the student conference and present my poster on my project all day long. Then on Friday S-STEM will be going on a field trip to the botanical garden which is awesome because I have never had the opportunity of going, and now that I do I will not be missing out. :)

The long days have begun

These past couple of days I have arrived at school at 7am and well it's a bit exhausting especially since I end up leaving like around 5 pm. From 7am-10am or 11am I'm in the lab after that I have classes until 1pm and after that I was in the lab 'till 5pm which is a pretty vast amount of time but it has its up sides. I have a somewhat good amount of my poster finished which is a good thing because those are a pain in the butt to do, not because they're hard but extremely time consuming. Since I was the first one to start my poster and had it saved on dropbox Matt and Josh told all the interns to use mine as the template which is totally find but now everyone's poster looks somewhat to mine, since they're all related :). Tomorrow I will be searching for a new template so that there won't be a resemblance with everyone else's, lets just hope I find one otherwise it would just look funny with everyone having the same poster.

On Wednesday I spent working in robotics, fixing some of the errors that the robot had encountered, since many of people there find themselves disagreeing with one another which is fine because that is process, the only problem was that things weren't getting done. I basically took the whole top part of the robot apart and build a newer version of it which I tried to make as symmetrical as possible, while also trying not to cut any pieces so it could be easily repaired or adjusted. Today since the robotics people were meeting up I showed them what I had done, at first they seemed a bit upset that I took it a part, but they soon came to realize that it was needed, since I wasn't there today to help them they worked on it themselves and I must admit they're off on a good path. Now that we had some ideas exchanged I now know what they want to do with the robot, before everything was done in a manner were only certain people knew what to do so it was hard for others to work on the robot without someone being there.

Anyways it's interesting to see how people interact with each other. I can always help as well if they need me :)

Weird week

   This week has been pretty weird for me because of everything I have going on like my project and school work. Today I worked on the bacterial cultures I have incubated a while back and it held good results except for some unfortunate few that were contaminated but I was still able to get data from the remaining ones. Basically what I did was count every single CFU's (Colony Forming Units) present on each individual dish meaning every dot on the dish was counted. The control plates that I had were the most contaminated of all the majority of them were contaminated but for the ones that were not contaminated I counted the CFU's and took the average of all the controls which theoretically should all have the same samples.

 




I also tested out this experiment for a lab that was meant to test out the levels of oxygen ppm, Nitrogen, and phosphate. At first the experiment seemed somewhat difficult but after I got started it was fairly easy. I was also timing myself to see how long it should take for someone to do it and it took me roughly 55 minutes but I also had multiple water sources to test out: tap water, DI water, and Papago water. It held some interesting results, At first I thought I had messed up somewhere but then I realized that everything was done properly so the results of oxygen was 0 ppm for all water sources, nitrogen was also at zero, the only one that gave me results was phosphate which Papago water was rated at 2 and both DI water and tap water were rated at 1.   

The Difficult Part

So now comes the hard part after 2 weeks it's time to get samples from my test tubes and try to identify the different species of algae. Based on observation alone it seems that the treatments with Sodium Phosphate added to it has the most growth and the weird thing is that tube #1 has the most growth which is expected but tube #2,3 had growth around the same as the control and tube #4 has the second highest amount of growth. Tube #1 had 1ml of a certain nutrient + 100μl of Sodium Phosphate and tube #4 had 25μl + 100μl of sodium phosphate. The nutrient Sodium Phosphate was added to the second set 100μl in each of the test tubes except for the control which is just plain Papago water which should have some nutrients in it. below are the tubes numbered 1-6 left to right.

When taking samples and putting it under the microscope I found that it was extremely difficult to identify all of the species so what I did was take picture with one of the microscope cameras which is somewhat better because I'm able to come back to the picture and see if my observations are the same as Matts. I did however see a pattern within the different sets mainly the one where tubes #1 and 4 had the most growth even though I expected #1 to have the most growth. Below are some of the many picture I took.

After resetting the last Pea plant set I got 28/30 seeds that germinated but the reason why they didn't germinate was because one of them had mold on it and the other was just rotten. The picture to the left shows the the two different reasons. The bottom was the one with the mold and it looked really weird because of the fact that it was like spider webs with little tiny black spots on it. The optimal temperature for the pea plants to germinate in is between 20-25 degrees Celsius. Another factor that I tested out was if light had a difference in the germination rate of the plants, but I came to find that it doesn't have any kind of significant changes to the rate of germination.
     About a Week has gone by since I put my fresh set of test tubes and as you can see there is some visible growth which is a good sign so far. Based on the tubes that have some growth in it are the ones that had Sodium Phosphate added to the tubes in addition to the normal solution. Next week I will be getting some samples from the test tubes to identify the different species of algae that are present in my set. While I look at the samples I will be setting the same experiment up so that I have more data to look at and compare it to the first.

Today I also helped josh with a small little task that involved the garden. I had to create a rectangle that is 33in x 36in out of PVC pipes so that one of the classes is able to plant seed in a grid system. I made one so far but now I must wait for more supplies to finish 2 more and glue all the pieces together.  

Well it's good to be back even though I have to hit the ground running because of all the stuff I have to do ranging from my main project, and my small project to organizing things, and helping set up for labs. It has been a hectic start for the semester so far because of the difficulty of my classes.  I also applied to the ASU student conference that is on March 4th and I got an email yesterday saying that I got accepted to participate in it. During this past week I have set up a new set of algae eutrophication which takes about two week for it to develop enough for it to be visible with the naked eye. I also had to redo one of the sets of my pea plant experiment which is set at 25 degrees Celsius and the light cycle is at 12 hours light and 12 hours dark this set should run for about 1 week this allows them to germinate. The purpose of this experiment is to determine what the optimal conditions are for the best germination rate.

The current setup that I have for my project is a bit confusing because I have 6 different treatments.
Materials:

• 40-15ml test tubes
• 6- test tube racks
• Papago park pond water and RO water
• 5-125ml Erlenmeyer flask
• Green pipette, and micro pipette
• Incubator set at 32 degrees Celsius with a light cycle of 16 hours light and 8 hours dark     

Nutrients: Sodium Nitrate, Sodium Nitrite, Ammonium Chloride, and Sodium phosphate.

Treatments: Sodium Nitrate, Sodium Nitrite, Ammonium Chloride, Sodium Nitrate + Sodium Phosphate, Sodium Nitrite + Sodium Phosphate, Ammonium Chloride + Sodium Phosphate.