Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

my 5th grader is doing the banana ripening experiment. We have 4 bananas in various storage situations (open air, ziplock, mesh bag, green bag). He is having difficulty converting his data to a table or graph. Any help would be appreciated

First of all, I think it depends on the type of data you gathered. What were you measuring? The type of graph or data table is somewhat dependent on the data. This is because it is harder to try to categorize both categorical and numerical data together. For example if he was looking at the color of the bananas and also measuring the weight of the bananas, it would be easier to perhaps do 2 different graphs.

Hi,

Christine has made some good comments. We do need to know what you measured. Which banana ripening project did you do? There are two banana ripening projects on the science buddies website. In one, the refractive index of the bananas is measured and in the second one, pictures are taken and the results evaluated.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p063.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p022.shtml

If you measured refractive index, you would graph time on the x axis and refractive index on the y axis. If you did the second project with the qualitative results, you could assign a number rating, e.g. 1 to 4 for unripe to ripe, and that would give you a number to graph for the y-axis. It would be helpful to have more than one family member rate the ripeness of the bananas.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Donna Hardy

You already have some good responses but I just wanted to add one thing...once again depending on the data you collected, you can make various types of graphs...just to give an example, if you measured the amount of time it took for each banana to ripen, you could use a bar graph to show the amount of time it took for each situation...
Like so, you can make graphs depending on your data...
Hope that helped!

In addition to the great comments above, I think that you should remember that there is not one "right" way to represent data from an experiment. The results from most science experiments can be represented in a variety of ways, each acceptable, and the method that you choose depends on which representation presents the data from your project in the most logical way.

Hope this helps, and Good Luck with your project!

Nithin T