Plants4Kids: Developed by NC State professors, website seeks to get kids excited about science, discovery at home

Anna Stepanova and Jose Alonso are a wife-and-husband team with NC State University’s Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. They focus on plant hormones and how they influence gene activity, growth rates and other patterns. But they're also parents of two kids, now teenagers, who wondered how to keep them busy during spring break one year.

Here's a Q&A:

Long story short, the kids quickly ran out of seeds from small commercial packets, as they wanted to try many different things at once, e.g., test different kinds of soil (sand, clay, or mulch?), depth of planting (seeds on the bottom of the cup below the soil or seeds on the top?), seed number per pot (one seed or all from the packet?), amount of water (how much water is too much?), etc.

I would not want kids experimenting on (and along the way, potentially torturing) live animals, but I have no reservations about kids working with (and accidentally killing) plants (e.g., by over- or underwatering — that's part of learning).

What do plants need to grow well? Is it better to have one seed in a pot or many (do plants get lonely)?  Is sunlight necessary for seeds to sprout?  How much water do plants need?  What soil type do they prefer?  How about the best temperature?  Are plants able to survive in salty soil?  How dangerous are household chemicals (e.g. bleach or laundry detergent) — would they kill plants?

By asking, and then finding answers to, simple questions like that, kids become experimentalists. They learn to formulate their questions and expectations and to include proper controls. For example, do freshly planted seeds need sunlight? I think plants need light in order to sprout, so if I put my pots with seeds under the kitchen counter where it's very dark, they won't grow, but the ones placed on a bright kitchen table will).

Kids learn that our expectations are often wrong (Wow, the plants under the kitchen counter grew taller than the ones on the table! But the leaves of plants grown in the dark are tiny and the entire plant is white rather than green!).

And unexpected results make kids ask follow-up questions such as why did the plants in the dark grow so tall? Maybe, they were looking for light, and they thought that they were trapped inside of the soil and, to be able to come out to sunlight, they put all of their energy into growing very tall. Why are their leaves so tiny? Maybe, if their leaves grew big, the sprouts will not be able to come out of the soil, as the leaves would make the task of squeezing between the soil particles impossible; staying skinny like a worm allows the plants to wiggle its way out of soil into the sunlight. And so on.

The challenge is that sometimes kids cannot come up with the answers on their own and maybe are not old enough to Google things to help answer the questions, such as why did bleach kill my plants? Does this mean that bleach is bad?  Then why does my mom use it?  Is not bleach what they put in the water in my neighborhood swimming pool? Am I in danger? That's where parents and teachers come in.

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We think that our experiments provide a good alternative to more typical activities (like indoor arts and crafts or outdoor chalk art). It's inexpensive (all of our experiments rely on supplies that kids can find around their house or outside, like beans from mom's pantry, recycled yogurt cups, and dirt from the backyard) and an opportunity to do something memorable and fun together as a family. And who knows, something like that can have a lasting effect on the kids, who may enjoy doing mini-experiments enough to decide to become scientists one day.