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Help me to help my kid understand photosynthesis. . .

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episodic

episodic

Lifer
OK,

We know about all the stuff on google. . .

The problem is I don't have a science background - and he wants to understand everything in it.

I think in 9th grade, they pretty much just want you to spout back the cycle to the teacher, but every complicated word he hits he wants to understand it all - like really understand it. Being in the 9th grade, obviously alot of this stuff is over his head (and mine). . . .


Can anyone recommend an in depth explanation that is painstaking in it's efforts not to alienate non-scientific backgrounded persons?

BTW: Yes, you read this right - a 15 year old on a Friday night wants his father to help him understand photosynthesis - I've got a good kid, don't let me let him down!
 
well, you know how we eat food and poop out the stuff from the food we don't need? plants and photoplankton eat sunlight and CO2 and poop out the oxygen "waste" they don't need

good enough?
 
Do you have a nature center near you?

Take a father/son nerd field trip! We have Fred Meijer Gardens. They have all kinds of plant nerds on staff that will spend hours going into detail about this kind of stuff.
 
You're kind of asking of opposite things here. An indepth explanation is gonna contain a lot of scientific detail. A explanation thats fit for the masses is gonna lack a lot of science
 
the plants have magic green stuff in them, they eat the sunlight and make energon cubes that the plant uses to grow larger. Sometimes transformers will harvest the energon cubes and megatron will try to steal them.


edit - but most of the the time, green stuff plus sunlight = energy for plant. Not for robots.
 
If he knows some basic chemistry, it will become a lot easier to explain. If you remember high school chemistry, look up the reactions that take place with Google and explain them to him.
 
The problem is it is 9th grade he has never had chemistry, and it has been - o 15 years since I've even thought about it. .
 
The chemical equations helped me understand it the best. Just take out those carbon chains and rename them with their more common name.

In short: sun hits chlorophyll, fuels reaction with carbon dioxide that produces sugar. If that's wrong, then screw you😉. It's been 5 years since I took bio.
 
wikipedia is the answer. Read it.

edit: seriously, it has pretty much all you need to know with relevant links to "complicated" words. Also, 9th grade is not too young to know photosynthesis in-depth, atleast to the level of like ap bio.
 
Overseas when I was about his age or younger, I asked my High School teacher to take extra time outside the class and guide me in the right direction to understand it. It took A LOT of research back then from my end. However I had a good background in Chemistry and Biology at that point. But I had no Wikipedia or internet back then. Do NOT be fooled in thinking that understanding the equation for the exchange of CO2 and O2 will give your kid enough insight. So much more is still in the background. You have to understand what is ATP and ADP . You have to understand how and why each photon that enters the photosynthesis process causes or induces an electron to move about it's way into the reaction and how the electron moves about in what form? This process in great detail is very complicated. I suggest you have your kid watch this animation video then watch the first animation link bluearyus posted (because it goes in depth into some key equations). At that point every time you guys hit something unkown to you, you research it up. For example googling and searching wikipedia about ADP and ATP and photon should give you the background needed to understand things.

However before ALL of that. You need to get your kid going on tutorials about Chemical Reactions. Wikipedia should be your first stop there. Understanding the concepts of Chemical conservation and equation balancing are crucial to getting the point understood at the end. Your kid needs to understand that not only chemical elements and number of said elements are conserved during a chemical reaction, BUT also charge. During a Chemical reaction charge is conserved just like Chemical elements are. If you have x amount of electron charges at this side of the equation, they may get distributed but at the end the total will stay constant.
 
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