Welcome my final blog post of grade 8! We are going to be finishing of the year with a Scimatics blog post, this time on out latest project called “Comic Cells”.

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What Was This Project❓

The driving question for this project was “How do cells and diseases interact?”. For this project we had to research a cell/virus/bacteria and create a comic that showed diagrams, realistic interactions and outcomes, and basically the process the body and cell go through.

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Some Things We Did 📝

Project Start Mind Map 🗺

As always at the beginning of a project we create a project start mind map. For me I decided to include what I knew already and the questions I had as the topics for the mind map. You can see my mind map below.

Storyboarding ✏️

Before we started to make our final polished comic we first had to make a storyboard. This was good to help flesh out the story and how I wanted the cells to interact as well as the diagrams I wanted to include. This is also the point where I did a lot of my research on my chosen disease.

Final Comic 🗯

To make my final comic all I had to do was take the storyboards and draw them to look like proper drawings instead of sketches. I decided to do my drawing in Photoshop for the iPad. I created all 12 drawing that I made for the storyboard and put those into comic life to create the actual comic. I had to then go back and add some more drawings to hit the number of panels required by the project criteria. You can read my final comic below.

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Competencies 💭

Questioning and Predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

I used all my class time to the fullest and was always able to deliver my work on time. I had all the necessary items to be able to work on my comic in class (storyboard, device, software).

Scientific Communication: Communicate ideas, findings and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies.

I was able to give over 10 scientific vocabulary words that were used in the correct scenarios. These words include metastasis, angiogenesis, etc. 

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence.

All my cancer cells interacted realistically with the other cells, such as the T cells. For example you can see the cancer cells dividing to create a tumour and you can see in the big battle scene the T cells are eating the cancer cells after killing them. The outcomes are also realistic you can see that the cancer spread through the body through blood vessels and the patient had to go in for radio therapy.

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Final Thoughts 🧠

This was a very fun project where I got to learn a lot of new things. I got to learn about how cancer works, how cells work, how to use Photoshop a bit better and more. We were also able to answer the driving question in quite an obvious way. To remind you the driving question was “How do cells and diseases interact?”. This was quite clearly done through the comic and researching our diseases as well as learning more about cells.