We Made an Army!?

Hello everyone and welcome back to another post. Today our focus is on science and the army we created. Now we didn’t create an actual army, we made a clone army! Except the clones weren’t human because that’s illegal and we would of been arrested. We cloned plants!

This project was a little different then most. Our goal was to create clones from another plant, then turn them into slides and try and find mitosis.

For those of you that don’t know mitosis is the process of cells splitting apart. It is how plants and bacteria grow. They duplicate themselves.

Here is a diagram on the stages of mitosis

As for all scimatics posts here’s my mind map

We did three main things in this unit. The first was making clone set one. To do this we went outside and dug up dandelion roots. We then planted them in cups and let them grow. While they were growing we planted our second clones.

The second clones could be any plant we wanted. The only restriction was that it had to grow within 1-2 weeks. Caleb my partner and I decided to clone garlic. The third major thing we did was lean how to make slides.

The slides are the things you put under the microscope to look at. It’s actually a pretty long process to make slides.

Our goal was to find mitosis in the slides of our clones. Unfortunately Caleb and I were unable to find mitosis in our dandelion clones. Our garlic on the other hand was a whole different story.

It had been about 2 weeks since we planted the garlic and they had grown a lot. The shortest was about 10 Cm tall and the largest, over 13!

We thought it was going to be easy to find mitosis. Boy were we ever wrong. We made over 5 slides trying to find mitosis in the garlic. After about a week of trying to find mitosis I was getting fed up. On the 6th and final try we finally found mitosis and boy was it a lot.

As you can see we found all the stages of mitosis almost instantly and it felt so good to finally find something.

That’s a look into what we do in scimatics hope you enjoyed.

-Emerson

This is for Mr. Gross our teacher, we have to put in 4 curricular competencies.

1. Collaboratively and individually plan, select, and use appropriate investigation methods, including field work and lab experiments, to collect reliable data. This was shown because if we didn’t do this our clones most likely wouldn’t have sprouted.

2. Formulate physical or mental theoretical models to describe a phenomenon. We showed this by creating a clear chart on the different stages of mitosis.

3. Select and use appropriate equipment, including digital technologies, to systematically and accurately collect and record data. This was shown because we were successfully able to create microscope slides by ourselves.

4. Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches. We showed this because Caleb and I worked really well together and collaborated well.

A Minute of Canadian History

Canada! A country that was only founded 152 years ago but already has such a rich history. In this project we had to create our own history minutes in groups of four. The time period for our videos was anything between 1800s and WW1. We were divided into 5 groups of four. Each group had a different topic that they had to focus on. My group consisted of Kiera, Taylor, and Luciano. Our topic was the Fur trade. We decided to focus on the voyageurs of Canada. Here was our end product.

Now we go though the process of getting an idea made into a video.

The Process 

Obviously the Fur Trade is a huge topic and narrowing it down can be a difficult challenge. One of the big rules for this project was that you could make your minute on a topic that had already been done. Fortunately Historica Canada (the company that makes history minutes) had not done anything about the fur trade so for us the door was open.

After a lot of research around what significant events happened during our time period after much debating we decided on the voyageurs of the fur trade. For those of you that don’t know the voyageurs were a group of elite First Nations men payed to move furs across Ontario and Quebec’s rivers.

We then plan out our video using a storyboard. After that we turned to the calendar to figure out a day that we could all film.

Then we went on the the filming stage. We ran into quite a few challenges while filming as it was very hard to make sure there were no houses or anything human built in the background. We also only had just over 2 hours to film everything as some people in our group had to go.

We then moved on to my favourite part of video making, the editing! I really enjoy editing because it’s all about precision. If one clip is a tenth of a second to long it could have drastic impact on the film and make it look very unprofessional.

Once I had put our clips together our first draft of our video was due.

As you can see the first draft was pretty solid but there was still quite a bit to change and fix for our second draft.

Here is our second draft. Some of the things we change were: we re-filmed all of Kiera and Taylor’s talking scenes as they were out of focus. We also changed transitions and extended/ cut a bunch of clips. We also add another scene.

This is our third and pretty much final video. For this draft we add music and I changed the font of the subtitles.

Here is our final video. It is the one featured at the beginning of this post. From the third draft we change the volume of the audio in different places. We also added a black screen at the beginning to add more effect. Also an outro at the end to tie it all together with the other videos.

After we made the video we then sent it to Historica Canada the company that create history minutes. We recently got feedback from Ryan Barnett and Joannne Archibald, who are important people at Historica. Here was their feedback.