Space Science & Growing Plants in Microgravity with Arduino

This middle school student took on a space-themed challenge for the STEM fair and built a clinostat with Arduino to explore plant growth in microgravity.

Growing Plants in Space

Evan, a middle school student in Milpitas, CA, built a solar oven for his school's STEM fair in 7th grade. Ready for a more advanced challenge the next year, he started the search for his 8th-grade project by browsing Arduino projects at Science Buddies.

The Grow Plants in Microgravity with an Arduino Clinostat project, which combines electronics, plant science, and space science, caught his attention. "I found this project interesting because of its complex and innovative ideas," says Evan, noting that he has always been interested in space science. He liked that the project had real-life implications related to "the idea of expanding life not just on Earth but in space" and was curious about learning more about agriculture in space.

For his project, Evan built a clinostat, a device that can simulate microgravity, and then used it to explore how plants might grow in space. On Earth, plants demonstrate gravitropism. They typically grow upward, and their roots grow downward. In microgravity, an environment with little or no gravity, the part of a plant that senses direction can't determine which way is up or down.

Using the clinostat to continuously rotate the plants, Evan was able to compare plant growth patterns in simulated microgravity with plants grown in Earth's gravity.

"The most challenging part of this project was setting up the Arduino IDE and the code that programs the motor," says Evan, explaining that this project was his first time using Arduino. Despite being new to coding, he followed the diagrams and video in the project and successfully built and coded his clinostat. In the end, his project offered clear results about the viability of plant growth in microgravity.

"The best part of the project was the data analysis," he says. "The analysis proved how successful my project had been."

Evan started high school this year and hopes to continue exploring STEM. "My love and curiosity for science will not end. I plan to keep on doing science projects in my own time. I find creating these experiments fun."

Evan is thinking about a career in neuroscience or bioscience.

Thank you to Evan for sharing this STEM project story with Science Buddies. If you have a story about doing a Science Buddies project or how Science Buddies makes a difference in your classroom or program, reach out to us at [email protected].