Microorganisms

Today in science class we started our discussion about microorganisms by thinking a little bit about bacteria and fungus. I posed a question to my class, "what in our school has the largest amount of bacteria present?" As one would expect, this got pretty gross in a hurry. First let's discuss our setup. Above is a bottle of agar, this is a sterile gelatin that is made of soy. We used substance in a petri dish to serve as our canvas for our bacteria portrait with a cotton swab as our brush.

With agar and swab in hand, it was time to go to work. I deployed students all over the school to gather bacteria from various places, and this is where we went....

Bathroom floors, toilet seats, toilet handles, and sinks.

Cellphones, keyboards, mice, and desk.

Office phones, lunch room key pads, floors, and tables.

Finally we used our swab to inoculate the agar.

Throughout the next four days we will be observing our agar dishes to see what location in our school produces the most bacteria colonies. Stay tuned for more on bacteria as well as tomorrow when we begin our investigations with fungi.

Mr. McClung