Rising Rate Experiment

Rising Rate Experiment & Graphs

Since my starters have not been very reliable or rising regularly, I decided to find a partner to work with to complete the rising rate experiment. I worked with Hannah Prescott on this experiment. She had three starters; a control starter, an apple variable starter, and a strawberry variable starter. She observed these three starters over a period of 2040 minutes. If you would like to see photos of these starters and how the experiment was performed, you can view her blog post about the experiment here.  Since Hannah actually performed the experiment, I used the data she collected to create the following graphs. 

In this first graph, you will see the changes in the absolute starter heights over time. This graph shows exactly how much each starter rose in centimeters throughout this given period of time. Creating and looking at this graph, we were able to visualize and determine that the strawberry variable was more reactive and was rising at a higher rate than that of the apple variable. The apple variable rose more than the control starter. 


This second graph depicts the percent increase in the three sourdough starters' heights over that same period of time. The trends shown on this graph closely mimic those of the first graph. This graph allowed us to determine and compare just how much the starters grew. For example, we can see that the strawberry variable experienced a percent increase in height of 140% at 1260 minutes, while the control starter had only increased its height by about 30% at that same time. 


Don't forget to check out the sourdough starters used in this experiment by visiting Hannah's blog at https://sourpusssourdough.blogspot.com/ ! 

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