Hi and welcome to my last scimatics blog post! For the past few weeks I have been working on a project in class called “comic cells.” The goal of the project was to research about either a disease or virus and make a comic about it in an app called comic life. It was supposed to show and tell how the virus or disease interacts with your body and cells. The driving question for this project was “ how do cells and diseases interact?”

Close to the start of the project, we had to pick our virus or disease. I chose to pick rabies which is a virus, after picking our thing we had to research a bit about it and make a wanted poster for it.  This is mine. ⬇️

As you can see in my poster I added a few short facts on rabies like the origin, death count, symptoms, how it effects your cells and what it actually is.

After making the wanted poster we had to start planning out our comics, so for a few classes I researched about rabies and then we started to make a storyboard. For my storyboard it was quite rough there was just ideas thrown out and quickly sketched, but it had most of my ideas out. Over time we started to get feedback from our teacher and classmates and we used that feedback to make our comics better and more refined. In the end I ended up with my final comic.

For a short description of my comic, basically there is a man named John. John decides he is bored in his life so he decides to go backpacking in Africa, while he is there he ends up encountering a rabid dog and it bites him. He doesn’t think much of it so he ignores getting bitten and he continues with his trip for a few weeks. After a few weeks he starts to feel the first symptoms of rabies, he ignores it again until he continues to feel sick so he goes to a doctor. The doctor explains what rabies is and how it interacts with his body, she also tells him that since he didn’t go to the nurse earlier he can’t get rid of the rabies virus so he will pass away. Now here are some images that show how my comic started versus where it ended. ⬇️

  • Before

Core competencies 

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

I think over this project I definitely used a lot of my time efficiently by researching and learning about my topic, I then used that knowledge and time and used it towards creating my comic book about the rabies virus. I think that this reflects throughout my book and grade, showing that I demonstrated a complete and sufficient performance while creating my comic book. I feel like I was engaged throughout this project and it was one of my favourite ones.

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

Throughout my comic and project I was able to use correct, accurate and scientific vocabulary. I had way more than ten scientific words and terms in my comic which was the needed amount at minimum. I found out that It can be very confusing to understand a lot of the words and terms while researching, when you try to simplify it it is very hard as well. It can be especially confusing for people who don’t understand the subject as well, so for some of the words in my comic I would put a more simplified understanding of it in brackets. I also used different diagrams of cells, viruses and human anatomy.

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence.

In my comic I have three main characters, a doctor, the man john and a rabies virus. In my story the rabies virus interacts in a scientific way. I definitely think I could’ve added another character into my story that interacted with the rabies virus in a scientific way. In my story there is definitely cell interaction with my virus.

I had tons of fun in this project and i think it was a great one to wrap up the school year, I am proud of my marks and performance in this project. Well thank you so much for reading my last scimatics blog post ever :’)