Mealworm Moves, You've Got to Move it!

Grade:

3

Teacher:

Michaela Rodrigues

In our SARSEF project, we wanted to find out if mealworms move faster on cold or warm platforms in one minute. We used six mealworms and gave each one a color name: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. For each test, we put a mealworm at the starting line, set a timer for one minute, and drew the path it took with a colored marker. After the minute was up, we measured how far the mealworm traveled using a ruler. We noticed that the mealworms went different distances each time, and sometimes they didn’t move in a straight line. Our results showed that mealworms moved farther on the cool platform than on the warm platform. This means that temperature, which is our variable, affects how fast the mealworms move. We also wondered if the marker colors made a difference, because some mealworms seemed to follow the ink. Our experiment taught us that mealworms move faster when it’s cooler, and that it’s important to measure and record everything to understand their behavior.

Project presentation