Comic Cells!

Welcome to the last project of grade 8! This project was all about how cells and diseases interact with each other at a cellular level. To show off our learning we created a comic book that goes through some of the things that happen when a disease enters your body. As always you can see my finished comic right here👇.

The Tales of the Lurking Leprae EPUB

Or

The Tales of the Lurking Leprae PDF

 

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

The first thing we did, like for all the science projects we did this year was make a Mindmap of all the previous knowledge and questions about the topic. This time I found myself asking a lot more questions since I didn’t have a lot of previous knowledge.

Before I could start work on the actual comic, we first needed to learn all about cells and how they interact to create a living thing, a subject that I knew pretty much nothing about previously. To do this, we used khan academy to go through all the knowledge we needed to know. The challenging part about this was the sheer amount of new information and concepts that we needed to learn. There were so many new words and parts inside a cell that I spent a lot of time keeping track of all them. It always amazes me how these cells are so small that we can’t even see them, yet still so complex that we are still learning new things about them everyday. It took a lot of class time to finally get through it all, but it taught me a lot of different science concepts that I would later use in my comic.

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

To start learning more about a specific disease to base our comic around, we first created a wanted posted. This wanted poster was basically a brainstorming exercise to gain a basic understanding of the disease we wanted to do. In this milestone, as well as in the final comic, there was a big challenge of communicating different scientific ideas through graphics, stories, while sticking to the theme. Creating a story that could include and show many different scientific facts and systems, while still being an interesting story was one of the most challenging parts of this project. I accomplished this by taking interesting sciences facts that I researched during the wanted poster, then turn those into plot devices. For example, I based pretty much the entire story around the fact that mycobacterium Leprae hijack macrophages to destroy the myelin sheath of nerves. I also based the plot twist around how mycobacterium leprae survives in the body by being “eaten” by the macrophage but never dying inside the cell.

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence

Another part that I spent a lot of time on was the art. I’m really bad at cartoon art, so it took a lot of trial and error to get the characters looking good. It turns out that all you have to do to make cartoons look good, is to just slap a moustache on them. However, making them look good was only one part of the challenge, the other part that I put a lot of thought into was making them represent scientific facts. For example, mycobacterium in real life is a cylindrical oval shape, so I made it look like that. Leprae also has the bacteria PGL-1 on it’s surface, so I put him in his top hat. The macrophages mouth was actually supposed to be it’s nucleolus. All the drawings had some part of the designs influenced by the science which I thought was a really good way to incorporate more interesting science into the comic.

Finally it was time to answer the Driving question, “How do cells and disease interact.” Cells and disease interact in so many ways, but it boils down to the disease and cells fighting to replicate and create more of themselves. Some cells try to prevent bacteria and disease from doing this like the macrophage in my comic. While the disease is trying to take over cells to trick them into creating more copies of themselves. But that’s just one example. Everyday millions of cells all work and interact with each other to create you, which I think is kinda disgusting but also really cool. In the end, cells and disease are very complicated things, and more is found out about them every day.

Overall I’m quite happy with my finished comic. Biology has never been my strong suit so it was quite a bit more challenging to understand the concepts then with other subjects. But by the end, everything mostly clicked into place and I could create a pretty good comic.

Thanks for following my learning journey through grade 8, and I’ll hopefully be back for more learning in grade 9

See you next time,

Nolan📙