DNA and Genetics

Since my last science blog post on safety in the lab our class has learnt and done an entire unit on DNA and genetics. Now usually I find it sometimes hard to understand and grasp some of the concepts we learn in science but I find throughout this past month I learned a lot.

This unit was based around the question “How does DNA and genetics determine the characteristics of living things?” Before anything else what each of us did was create a mind map to show our knowledge about DNA and genetics I didn’t really remember a hole lot from last year so this is what I came up with:

To start off we got introduces into our big unit project which we would worked on throughout this unit. This project was based around answering our unit questions by creating a podcast. But before we started working on this project we needed to know more about DNA and genetics, so one of the first things we did was watch a crash course video about the basics of DNA.

This was helpful but at the same time they talk so fast in those videos that I should’ve probably watched the video a couple of times to fully understand what was going on.

Throughout this unit we learned about different this such as traits, genotypes, phenotypes, recessive genes, dominant genes, homozygous and heterozygous. But most importantly we got into all of that we started off with the basic of DNA and genetics such as DNA is made up of sugars phosphate and nitrogen bases (AT, CG). also DNA looks coiled up and like a ladder (which is called the double helix).

One thing I found very interesting during this unit was learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution as I could actually relate to this topic as I have gone to the Galápagos Islands and seen the finches and torturous that have evolved to the different islands and adjust to their surroundings but over millions of years.

We then went onto learning about Identical twins on teacher collaboration a website where we read a couple of articles as well as worked on a couple of worksheets about DNA, Genes, identical twins etc. One question that arose during this was “if two sets of identical twins get married ( identical twin boys each marry identical twin girls) and each coup’e has a child would the resulting children be identical? This question was very relevant in the creation of our podcast and would be one of the themes of our podcast. Here are the outlines we had to follow for our podcast as well as what we would be marked on overall:

As this is a group project Mimi and I created a script together, music in garage band and recorded in Ferite and finally put it together in iMovie. Our first draft of our podcast we created was good but some improvements we made for our final draft was definitely talking slower as week as adding in some information to our script. This added onto our time to make sure we were in the required time as well as made us look back on our work and correct our mistakes.

Here are the scripts we wrote for draft one and our final podcast:

Here is our final production of the podcast:

After finishing our podcast I think their are definitely things we can change such as making the audio fluent throughout and maybe adding some change of music throughout the podcast. But overall I am proud of the final product and critique we got from our teacher Mr. Gross:

Once we finished our video we had retry much completed this unit our final step was to create a new mind map with all the information we learned throughout this past month. For me I especially felt like I learned new things and understand curtain parts of the unit after this project. I think this was a great way to start science class off on the right track to reach my goal of doing well in science

here is my mind map: