Will Color Affect Temperature in the Dark?

Will color affect temperature in the dark? This is a good questions. To figure it out we will need to complete botany science fair projects.

The question that we need to answer with our science fair project is, "will color affect temperature in the dark?" This means that our hypothesis will be that color does affect temperature in the dark and that are null hypothesis will be that color does not affect temperature in the dark.

EDU-36820 C2D Discovery Planet Digital Microscope / Videoscope	DNA Extraction	Young Scientists Club Set - Nature Walk	Discovery Planet EDU-41021 Maxscope Videoscope
Age 10 and up	Ages 11 and up	Ages 4 -12	Ages 10 and up

The equipment and materials that we need for our biology science fair projects include:
plants with different colored leaves or petals
terrarium, video camera with night vision
thermometer

To evaluate the data that you collect you will also need reference materials to complete t-test and z-tests.

Setting up your experiment is pretty straight forward.

1. You will want to place several plants into a terrarium.
2. You will take the surface temperatures of each plant at various points, including the stem, leaves and petals.
3. You will them turn off the lights so that the room is dark and wait a half hour. You will then use your night vision camera to record the temperatures of the same spots on each plant and record this data in your notebook.
4. You will conduct another three sets of readings at 60 minutes, 90 minutes and 120 minutes under the same conditions.

To analyze your data you will want to see if the color of the plant part had any impact on the retention of heat. To do this you will want to chart the temperature changes, if any, that occurred at the various temperature readings. You will have three graphs for each plant, one for the stem, one for the leaves and one for the petals. Make sure you label the color of the item being charted. This will help you spot trends by colors, and it will help you to prove your hypothesis or null hypothesis.

Next you will want to draw your conclusions. If you found that some colors retained heat better in the dark than others then you can conclude that according to your experiment, the hypothesis is true. However, before you make this conclusion you will want to run your data through a t-test. This will determine if your data produced results that were caused by chance or by real correlations between variables and stimuli. If the t-test comes out negative then your null hypothesis is most likely true.