Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My 5th grade daughter's project is to culture the number plates of cell phones of her class members. On a Monday, she and her partner age going to culture the cell phones of the kids in their classes. They will then make a short presentation of cell phones and bacteria and have each kid wipe the number plate of their cell phone with a Chlorox wipe. They will have each kid wipe the cell phone every morning that week. On Friday, prior to the cleaning, they will culture the cell phones again. This is the experimental group. The other 2 classes will have their cell phones cultured on Friday only, and will have no intervention. We have a physician who will go to the school with the girls and supervise the colleciton of specimens, transport them home and incubate them in a homemade incubator (glass aquarium and light bulb). The girls will evaluate each plate every 24 hours for 3 days and do a colony count.

Our hypothesis is that the cell phones that have been cleaned recently will be cleaner than those just carried in the backpack. We hope to show that germs show up in unexpected places.

Does this seem like a valid experiment? Thanks...

Hi!
This certainly seems like a great idea for a science fair project. Here is the link to a helpful ScienceBuddies guide on the Scientific Method-
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... thod.shtml
Remember to clearly label all cultures/swabs and obtain as many samples as possible for the most accurate results. If you have any other questions, feel free to post again. Good luck!!

That sounds like a great project idea! It's going to generate a lot of data, so make sure the girls are ready to collect all of it.

-Lisa

Hi!

I think this sounds like a great science project to get a whole class involved. I have one question. Why are you having the one classroom culture every day of the week and the other only one day? I think with one classroom you would have enough data to do both classrooms only one day. You could even take a culture from the dirty cell phones, have the "intervention," clean the phones and take a second culture. I'm just trying to think of ways to make it easier and make the variables consistent. That way they are the same phone types, same day, same culture technique if you do it that way.

Hope that helped, let us know if you have any more questions.