She decided to run her test using the carpet in the cultural hall at church. It's a high traffic area that is used for both eating and recreation. She dropped a moist (sticky) food like cheese and a dry food like a cracker and timed how long she left each item on the floor. She then swabbed the food and applied the swab to a petri dish to try and grow bacteria.
We incubated petri dishes for a couple of weeks at home and viola we were growing stuff. The results were basically that it didn't matter so much how long the food was on the ground but the type of food that was on the ground. As you can imagine, the sticky cheese grew the most bacteria and the crackers not really anything.
So, 1)there is nasty bacteria on the church floor. 2)if you drop something sticky on the floor don't eat it, even if it's only been for a second!
Our family, went to support Ashley at the Science Fair. There were tons of projects, but she did pretty good, took 4th place in the Microbiology category. Good work Ashley!
