Recently we finished a project about the several stages of Mitosis and Meiosis which is a process which the human body undergoes in the making of a baby.
This project was both interesting a bit of a struggle for me because I was away for the beginning of the project so I was a little lost when I came back.
What we ended up making after countless hours of research and recording was a narrated video of the different stages of Mitosis and Meiosis shown as 3D models we created in tinkercad.
As usual, our project started with a Project start Mind Map about what we already knew about Mitosis and Meiosis and what questions we had. Looking back at it now I believe I could have added way more questions or thoughts but then again I didn’t really know what to ask about since I barely knew anything.
Milestone 2 came around rather quickly which was when we started getting back to Tinkercad. The last time we used Tinkercad was 1 year ago, during my “Hawg Rider” project so we needed a quick refresh about how to use Tinkercad and its many functions.
To actually get some physical examples of Mitosis, each student planted garlic cloves and carefully took care of them until they had grown multiple big enough roots for us to cut and examine. Once our garlic roots were ready, we cut very small pieces of the root and put it under a microscope so that we could find cells that were undergoing different stages of Mitosis.
We soon began to start making our models which were a bit frustrating to make since Tinkercad is a little hard to handle on an iPad, but managed to get them finished. I think its great that we used a 3D printing website/app to create these but doesn’t it make sense to then actually print them?? Just my opinion.
{insert tinkercad models}
Finally what took me the longest was taking these models and turning them into a narrated video. What happened with me is I spent a lot of time explaining each stage, comparing processes with each other, and explaining our garlic expirement. I think that my video was very thorough and informative which is probably why it ended up being a little longer than planned.
Core competencies
Questioning and predicting:
As said in my evaluation rubric, I used all class time to work on my project and accomplished a demonstrated sustained intelectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest
Planning and conducting:
Although my group struggled a little on the microscope slides of the garlic clones, we managed to accomplish to collaboratively and individually plan, select, and use appropriate investigation methods, including field work and lab experiments, to collect reliable data.
Scientific communication:
I received a mixture of a mark between accomplished and extending in this core competency because I created A recorded video with voice narration explains the reasons for and processes of mitosis and meiosis with accurate 3D models and Photographs Similarities and differences are also described.
As I said before, I thought this project was a little tough but I think it was interesting to learn about the processes the human body goes through to reproduce the human race.