What is Tomatosphere?

Tomatosphere is a research project involving more than 9,000 classrooms of Grades 2 to grade 10 students ("Tomatonauts") across Canada, the United States and several other nations. In 2008, students will have the opportunity to grow tomatoes from seeds that have been placed in an environment to simulate the effects of aerocapture, as might occur when entering the atmosphere of Mars, and a control group. In the research project, students will be asked to germinate the seeds, but will not know the origin of the seeds until the results are reported to the web site. At that point, the teacher receives an automatic response indicating which seeds were from each group. This methodology, known as a "blind study" will allow the mystery of the project to be real for the students.

(the above is directly quoted from the FAQ's on the Tomatosphere site)

The experiment is open to public schools and homeschoolers and there is a wealth of information on their website. There are teacher manuals to lead you through it and they are broken down into 3 different grade levels, each one covering different topics:

Gr.2-4 ~ Plants, Soils & Habitats

Gr.5-7 ~ Human Needs, Weather & Space

Gr. 8-10 ~ Space Exploration & Sustainability of Ecosystems

Complimenting each level are also corresponding PDF's of posters & charts covering scientific investigation, plant information, seeds in space and again each one is broken down into the specific grade levels so that you don't have to do a lot of searching.

(Click the above image to go directly to their registration page)

There's still time to sign up for the 2008 Tomatosphere Project! So hustle over there and get your seed packets sent immediately. Don't miss out on the fun!!