Hi again, ‘tis I, Dylan! This unit in Scimatics, we learned about cells and diseases. This unit, rather than having a diving question, we had a ‘big idea’, which was “Life processes are preformed at the cellular level”. We had to represent the big idea in Milestone 5, which was making a comic that showed, well, life processes being preformed at the cellular level. My comic, Vinny the Virus, was about Vincent, an Influenza virus genome. It follows his adventures as he infects a human and jumps from cell to cell, infecting more, um, cells. That being said, It’s time to move onto the curricular competencies.

Questioning and Predicting

Since I was representing the Influenza virus in my comic, I had to do some of my own research about the Influenza virus and how it works. I learned about what it looks like, how it attacks cells and what cells it attacks. The Influenza virus looks similar to COVID-19. It mainly attacks the.. erm.. oh my, how do I spell this..? The Columnar Epithelial cells….? (After looking it up and many spell checks, I spelled it right.) It binds onto the cell and then releases the RNA into the host cell. When the RNA hijacks cell, it forces it to produce new capsids to infect other cells (capsids are what the RNA is stored in). I’m not entirely sure why I chose the Influenza virus but it was really interesting to learn about. I thought learning about how the virus works was very cool. It’s crazy to think of how small yet complex it all is and how so much stuff goes on unnoticed in our bodies.

Scientific Communication

Throughout the comic book, I showed a few diagrams, which I tried to make as accurate as possible, with labels and such. I drew all the diagrams as well as the rest of the comic in Sketches Pro. I used Comic Life to make the actual comic. Comic Life is really fun and very easy to work with too. I also used lots of scientific words in my comic, which is a really great way to seem intelligent and sophisticated. I feel like I did a good job representing how the Influenza virus works and how it infects cells. Even though my characters were in the form of stickmen, I still feel like I did a good job representing how the Influenza virus works and how it infects cells. (I also added a footnote clarifying that virus genomes don’t actually look like stickmen.) I also did my best to represent all the things that go on when a virus attacks a cell. Additionally, I tried to add some humour into my comic so it wasn’t just boring old science stuff (sorry Mr. Gross).

 

Evaluating

I tried my best to make the interactions with my characters as scientific as possible, given the fact that the comic revolved around anthropomorphic virus genomes who speak fluent English. I showed the virus proteins hijacking the cell and I showed genome replication. I also showed the host showing (I’ve used the word ‘show’ too much and too frequently throughout this post) symptoms of the Flu. I showed the cell getting attacked by antibodies too. I also spent quite a bit of time double checking my facts and information to make sure it was all correct. Well, that being said, I should probably show you my comic now!

 

I hope you liked my comic! I had a lot of fun making it.

 

Well, thats pretty much it! I hope you enjoyed all 625 words (not counting those in the comic) of this blog post! This was my last project for this school year, so you won’t hear from me for a bit!

Bye!

Dylan.