Unit 1 Part (A). Creating a Lab Notebook

When doing hydroponic experiments, it is important to keep a notebook so that you can keep a history of what you have learned.

A notebook can be constructed in many different ways, but one of the best known is Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks.

Leonardo was a painter, a civil engineer and an inventor who lived from 1452 to 1519. Leonardo kept his ideas in a series of notebooks. He drew pictures and wrote comments about his ideas and his experiments. When he died he left his notebooks and we now know about his ideas and his research from these cherished documents. The Codex Leicester is a Da Vinci notebook recently purchased by Bill Gates (of Microsoft).

You can use the same design in your notebook that Da Vinci used. The idea is to draw pictures and use arrows in the pictures to show what you mean. This is also called mechanical illustration or sketching. At first your drawings may not look as good as Da Vinci's but they will improve with practice. It also is good to use ink pens and colored pencils or crayons to color the drawings.

A notebook should also record the information that you gather. If you have an idea and wish to test it with an experiment, describe your idea and what you intend to do in the notebook. Be sure to record what happens for both success and failure in experiments. Sometimes failures lead to new ideas.