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 Metaphorical Machine!

 

Welcome to a new post my readers. Today post is featuring 2 subjects; scimatics and humanities! In this project we learned about steampunk, the Industrial Revolution, metaphors, Revolutions, circuits, and scale diagrams. For this post I have divided it into three sections. The humanities side, the scimatics side and the actual video it’s self. Now let get it going with the humanities side!

Humanities

In this unit I learned a lot about steampunk and the Industrial Revolution. If you haven’t read my Steampunk post which defines steampunk and what it is you can check it out here. We started out this unit by learning about a man named Crane Brinton.

Brinton was an American historian who is best known for his book The Anatomy of a Revolution. Brintons theory was a guildline that almost all revolutions follow. In his theory he compares a revolution to a virus. His says that there are four stages to a revolution. I also compared his stages of a revolution to a story spine there is a exposition or incubation stage, next is the rising action or moderate stage, third is the climax or crisis stage, and finally is the conclusion or recovery stage.

After that we moved on to picking our revolutions. There were five different revolutions to pick from the options were: Russian, French, American, Chinese, and Haitian. I got put into the Chinese one with Jason, Kiera, and Sam. For some reason Ms. Maxwell our teacher decided to put all the asians into a group doing an Asia  revolution.

The requirements for this project were: there had to be at least 6 different metaphors, we had to fit all onto a 120 by 60 Cm board, and we had to incorporate a circuit.

The first thing we did about our revolutions was find out more about them. We had to make a timeline with all of our important events that happend in our revolution.

We then moved on to creating our metaphors. Because so much happens in a revolution and we can’t make every event into a metaphor we decided to pick the 6 most important events that happend in our revolution and turn them into metaphors. My group and I decided on these six events to be represented in our machine.

After we decided our metaphors we moved onto drawing. At this point I would like to remind you that this post is a multi subject one meaning we worked on this project in multiple subjects and got a grade for each one. At this moment I am going to switch to the scimatics side of things and come back to the humanities section in a bit. Thanks and hope you continue to enjoy this post.

Scimatics

While we were learning about history in humanities, in scimatics we were working on scale diagrams. For this we used a website called khan academy which you can find right here. I highly recommend it for anyone struggling in math because if you don’t understand the lesson there are videos that explain how to do it. Also its free!

Our work on scale diagrams was very interesting. Once I got the hang of it, it was quite easy to do. Anyways our first diagram blueprint that we drew was pretty good.

Once we had that done we began to learn about circuits. In this unit I learn a lot about electricity and how current flows. As well has how to get more power from the same amount of battery’s. We did quite a few worksheets and experiments that helped me understand and then further extend my knowledge about electricity.

As I said earlier we had to incorporate and make a circuit into one of our metaphors. Me and Sam were in charge of designing and making our circuit. We decided to make a parallel circuit an run a copper wire across the track so when the golf ball rolled through it would switch our circuit off.

The switch circled in black was a wire that ran across the track

Me and Sam not only had to design our circuit but we actually had to make it. Working as a team we had to sauter the wires and LEDs together so that they wouldn’t fall apart.

Now back to humanities

While me and Sam were hard at work making the circuit, Jason and Kiera were busy working on the machine its self. They had to spray paint and glue gun the tracks to the board. Everything was going along very well until we ran into a problem. Our original plan for the scale did not work so we ended up remodelling the scale so that it was easier to make.

It took us about 1 and a half weeks to make and build our machine. Then we spent another 2-3 days repeatedly making test runs to make sure that it worked. After we did our full run through we start making our video.

The video that we ended up with was very good. My group and I decided that me and Sam did a lot of the building of the machine so Jason and Kiera did most of the work editing the video. For science we also had to make a final blueprint and circuit diagram which you can find below.

Now with out further ado here is our final machine video hope you enjoy.

Conclusion

Refleting back on this unit there were many things that I learned. From the revolutions to circuits to even how to build and improvise if something doesn’t work. I really though I increased my knowledge on many things including how a revolution happens, what happend in The Industrial Revolution and how circuits and electricity work as well.  I really enjoyed this unit and I can wait to write about the next. Until next time 👋

-Em