GMO Food vs. Organic- Preparing for our Experiment

We mostly finished our research during the beginning of the project, and in order to finds foods that we could use for our experiment we have learned about what foods are commonly modified. We have learned that we need to stick to our schedule. If we follow our plan, then we will get the project done on time. We have also found that planning an experiment can be hard because there are many different parts to it. For an experiment, you have to find people willing to participate, a way to put together your data, a plan for how it will go, and how to analyze your data after your experiment is over.

One setback that we have faced is getting the materials for our experiment, including the food, in time. We plan to conduct our experiment during next week on Tuesday or Wednesday. We will have to decide who will get what and how we will bring it to school. We will also have to organize our data for the experiment. Our next steps in our process is to get materials for our experiment and then conduct it during the next week. We also have to create a data table and two charts for people to give their input about the food, and after we would have to do is analyze and see if our results are what we expected them to be. We can apply what we learned to our lives by being more aware of what we eat every day. We have also learnt how some foods we think are harmless could have effects on our health later in life. There are clearly two different sides to this argument, and we are trying to compare what people prefer with the facts that we have now.

GMOs vs. Natural Foods Update

We have learned about general pros and cons of genetically modified food and natural food, how GMOs are modified, and what foods are mostly modified, like apples, corn, and soy products. This will be used for the informational part of our project. The other part is the experiment. We also have learned about how you can tell the difference between what is modified and isn’t by the barcode number, and if it has a sticker that says that it is not modified.

We haven't had any setbacks so far when doing our 20 Time Project. We just need to figure out how our experiment will work, and we could face a setback at that point. We may need to research how to design a good experiment and look at our vodcast notes about experiments to get a sense of how we should go about planning it. We will also have to find people who are willing to be our test subjects, and they will be trying the foods that we select and rating them. If we have any setbacks later on, we plan on discussing with each other about what would be the best choice to make for the project.

Our next steps in our process is figuring out what foods we want to use for our experiment and how we will conduct it. It needs to be controlled and planned well so that we will get accurate results. That is probably what we will be working on for the next few weeks. We haven’t learned anything new about ourselves yet, but as this project goes on, we probably will. There is not really much to apply to ourselves or our school, besides the information we have found by researching. We will need to complete our experiment to get to that point. Hopefully, we are able to achieve our goals for these upcoming weeks and after that, conduct our experiment.

Introduction to Genetically Modified Foods

20 Time is any project that will take up about 20% of your time, whether it is class time or something else. It can be described as a "passion project" and should be about something that you are interested in. It can be solving part of a problem, asking a question and figuring out the answer, or just an experiment about anything. It will be something that takes time, but in the end, the result will be something that you can show others or use to teach others about your topic.

The essential question that we asked was, “What is the difference between genetically modified foods, and which is better for you?” We have chosen to do our 20 Time project on the difference between genetically modified foods and natural foods. We chose this project because we had recently learned about this subject in our unit on biotechnology. Our project choice answers our essential question, because after researching on the topic and conduct on experiment we can see why people would rather choose one food or the other based on the qualities of the food.

Our goal is to provide more information to people about this topic using a presentation and also forming our own opinions about the difference between natural and GMO food based on our experiment and research. This experiment will involve people rating the two different foods based on taste and appearance.

We will measure our progress creating blog posts to give information on what we have researched and see how much we still have to do until we finish conducting our experiment. Our plan moving forward is to continue our research about this topic over the few weeks, and then ultimately, plan our experiment. We will have to figure out how to keep the whole experiment controlled and what materials we will need to do the experiment. Also, we need to come up a rating scale for people who will give their opinion on the quality of the two different foods.