Nikisha Patel
Attributes
Hard working – putting all of your effort into finishing something.
Tenacious – sticking with a difficult task until it is completed.
Collaborative – working well in a team or pairs.
About Nikisha
Nikisha is a botanist who has recently graduated from a top American university with a first class degree in Biology. She is incredibly hard-working and this showed during her time at University in order to achieve such a high standard qualification. Nikisha now works with a team of Botanists studying some of the rarest plants in the world and has to be collaborative so she can work well with others and share new ideas. Her job also means she gets to travel the world to find some of the plants! Sometimes finding the plants she needs to study can be very tricky and once found the work she has to do is difficult and challenging but Nikisha is tenacious; so refuses to give up until she has solved the problem.
Science For Families: Plants
By now, you’ve probably already done some experiments with plants; growing seeds in a bag and dissecting the parts of a flower.
Seeds are amazing! They can hang around for years not doing anything at all, and then with just a little water and the right temperature, BOOM: they start to grow. One of the oldest seeds ever to grow into a plant was around 2000 years old.
Seeds are able to sense the environment around them, using systems known as tropisms. They have hydrotropism which allows the roots to sense water and grow towards it. Plants needs water to survive and they get it through their roots. The shoots have something called phototropism, which means they sense and grow towards the light. Plants need light in order to make food. To make sure that the roots grow downwards and the shoots grow upwards, the seed can sense gravity: it ‘knows’ which way is up and which way is down. This is called geotropism.
There are loads of experiments that you can do with hydrotropism, phototropism and geotropism. Here are just a few to get you started:
- Try growing seeds in different amounts of light and dark. This PDF will get you underway, but feel free to use whatever you have around the house. Old cereal boxes work well!
- Let your seeds start to grow. When the roots and stems have started to appear, turn the seed upside down and wait a few days. What happens? Try turning it the other way up again.
- Take two cups, and fill one with water. Make a paper towel bridge between the two and place some germinating seeds on the paper towel bridge. Cover the whole thing with a clear plastic cover, something like this. Watch which way the roots grow.
Colour-changing plants
Plants are pretty amazing all on their own, but if you want to have a go at customising your flowers, here’s a video that shows you how:
We decided to take it one step further and tried to make multi-coloured flowers. By carefully splitting the stems with a sharp knife (sound the adult assistance alarm!), and placing the ends in differently-coloured water, we managed to make some two-tone tulips (technically carnations, but who can resist adding alliteration?).
Check out our gallery:
The Botanist
Ask your child: what is a botanist?
Today NUSTEM have been into school to do the botanist workshop with your child. During the workshop, we supported the children to feel more confident that a career in STEM is for ‘people like them’ by trying some of the activities a botanist would do in their job.
We introduced three attributes that the children may already have or can develop. By discussing STEM careers in terms of these attributes, we are encouraging children and young people to see themselves as having the skills to work in STEM.
Botanists are: curious, patient and observant.
What do Botanists do?
Botanists study plants including algae, fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. They study how plants live and grow, the evolution of plants and the relationship plants have with their environments. Their research is involves improving crops, developing medicines, cleaning up contaminated sites, and even powering our cars.
Do try this at home: make a plant pop up
Today we made these plant pop ups to record what we had observed about the Venus Fly Traps that we observed during our botanist session in a creative and imaginative way.
You may have a favourite flower in your house, garden or yard that you would like to observe and record using a pop up or you may want to use one of our flower photographs as inspiration.
You will need:
- Card or paper (A4 is easiest but any size will do)
- Scissors
- A pencil
- Felt tips, crayons or colouring pencils
- Photographs of plants (see below) or the ability to search the internet for these
Step 1
Fold the card or paper in half, and then in half again so it is in quarters. Open up the card so that it is folded in half, with the quarter fold running across the middle and the half fold along the left hand side.
Step 2
Fold the top left hand corner and bottom left hand corner into the centre fold. Open out these folds. Turn over the card and fold the corners into the centre fold again, so they have been folded both ways.
Step 3
Inside the triangle created, draw a curved line from the left hand folded edge to the diagonal fold. This will make the shape of your petals. Cut along the curved line with your scissors.
Step 4
Fully open up the card. Put your finger on the centre of your petal, at the top of the vertical fold line. Pull your petal towards you and fold it along the vertical line. Do the same with the lower petal. Fold the card in half again. Your top and bottom petals should be folded to form a flower inside your card.
Step 5
Draw your flower by adding extra petals and then colour these in. You can add the stem and leaves if you want to.
Now try experimenting with different shaped petals. You could make the petals more narrower or wider by folding in the corners more or less (step 2). You can also change the shape of your curve (step 3).
