Science Experiment Help

StephanieW

Describe an experiment to determine the variety of Micro-Organismsthat may be present in school toilets
**How do you compare to domestic?


Please Help Its Important

Tree

Comparing with domestic should be pretty straightforward, you simply repeat your experiment in each environment in an identical manner, and treat all your samples the same.

Which part are you actually looking for help with? (Bearing in mind, we won't /do/ people's homework but are happy to assist with understandings)

StephanieW

I understand that part and you should have more bacteria in a school bathroom than a domestic bathroom.

I just need a little research and a few ideas to get me on my way as my teacher is expecting a lot from me as I am a higher level student.


Also, I don't want you to do it for me.


I understand what I have to do just the way of writing it. I have to include conditions that will disrupt the experiment slightly ie. lots of people using the bathrooms, more people equals more bacteria, as door is open airborn bacteria will get it, the temperature will chance constantly as doors are opened and closed and when the person walks in.


I also have to include a result and a conclusion or the experiment will be useless, which I usually have a problem with.

Capt'n Midnight

There will be more people in a school bathroom so the chances of getting who is more unhygienic than average is likely. (see for example the detection of traces of cocaine in the public toilets in RTE)


However school bathrooms would certainly be cleaned at regular intervals. Cleaning interval and efficiency in domestic bathrooms will depend on the household and will vary wildly, you would have to sample lots of them or give your assumptions to choose a smaller set to compare with.


When you ask about variety do you mean completely different species or strains ?
You are likely to find e. coli in all bathrooms but I would assume that a family bathroom would have less strains than a bathroom shared by people from multiple families.

StephanieW

I Think by the question it means different species.

What do you mean by strains?

Capt'n Midnight

StephanieW wrote: »

I Think by the question it means different species.

What do you mean by strains?

In that case don't worry about it



Buy you would need to state any assumptions you make about the average household.

Tree

Don't forget, for every experiment you need controls. In this case you will need negative controls (you can set up positives if you like also, but I'd imainge you should get plenty of postivity from your samples). A negative control (blank plate) is set up with /each/ set of samples, to show that the plates themselves weren't the source of any growth.

Also, you should sample multiple bathrooms if possible, so you can average your results across the same envirionment. Likewise multiple home bathrooms. Ensure you sample from the same sorts of points(say taps, flusher handles, door handles) (and label yoru plates well).

IF there's a cleaning schedule it might be interesting to sample before AND after the cleaning, to determine if the cleaning is anygood.