Category: Science

Driving Question:

🏎️ How does our knowledge of cell biology contribute to public health?

Field Journal:

We created a field journal in Keynote about how bacteria grows and we made a hypothesis and a question and when we did the experiment we recorded the results.

🦠 Small But Mighty! 🧬 

In this project we investigated bacteria and germs. We learnt about pandemics like polio and smallpox and we applied our knowledge about COVID 19 and we talked about how they dealt with the virus and how long it took for them to develop a vaccine in terms to now. We made a journal about the research and tests we did on bacteria and we recorded the results in there. I learnt a lot about how our body works and it helped me understand how I get sick.

 

How do we Interact With Cells and Cellular Organisms?

We used microscopes to find out what the cell theory was. We looked at rain water and plant cells that we got from the forest outside the school. The cell theory is that all living organisms are made up of cells, and that cells come from life and create life.

There are many different types of cells. One of them is a Prokaryotic cell. It’s job is it to carry DNA within the cell, it isn’t very complex but does an important job. The eukaryotic cell is much more complex and it has a nucleus that stores all of the DNA 

The Innate Immune System and the Adaptive Immune System 

We learnt about the Innate Immune system. The innate immune system is your bodies built in immune system and it already knows how to fight off bacteria. The innate immune system has different types of pathogens that help fight off bacteria. The second part of the innate immune system are the types of chemical barriers that fight off bacteria and they work against the pathogens. The adaptive immune system is really cool. It changes and adapts to the different pathogens trying to invade. This is important because if you get sick once, your body will remember it and they will know how to fight it off.

Petri Dish Experiment

We learnt about how bacteria works and how it spreads, but that wasn’t the main part of the project. The experiment that we did was pretty simple but it was very cool. I swabbed q tips on the bathroom floor and one on the hallway floor. My question was “which floor has more bacteria on it?” I’d figure this out by rubbing the q tips on two Petri dishes and the bacteria would grow and which ever one had the most bacteria on it would be the dirtiest. 

Journal Continued 

We wrote and recorded our results and hypothesis in our journal that we made on Keynote. I recorded photos of the Petri dish and how much bacteria was on it. My hypothesis was if I take a q-tip and swab the floor of the bathroom, then it will have more bacteria than the hallway floor. And my prediction was the amount of bacteria will be higher on the bathroom floor then the hallway floor. In conclusion I said This proves that my hypothesis is correct because the bathroom floor had more bacteria than the hallway floor. If I let it sit for longer, would there be more bacteria. I wonder how much bacteria there is after the custodian cleans it? There is much more bacteria on the 8th day which makes sense because the longer that bacteria sits, the more it grows. My hypothesis was still correct even after the 8th day, it still stayed the same but there was just more bacteria.

Immune System Cards

For our immune system cards we drew 5 characters that resembled the different cells and then we wrote about them and how they connect to it. I drew characters from the games My Singing Monsters. This is because a lot of them resembled the different cells. It was very difficult to draw the. Because they had lots of detail and I had to make them look exactly what they looked like in the game and it was interesting trying to connect a video game character to a cell in your body.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I learnt so much from this project, I learnt about polio, vaccines, cells, and taking notes. Overall, it taught me more than most projects this year and I took away a lot. Thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you again in the next one.

🏎️ Driving Question:

The driving question for this project was:How can we model our knowledge of the atom in a fun and creative way?

What Did we Do?

There were many things that we had to do to complete this project, we had to figure out how to use scratch, thankfully I had done it when I was like 8 and I somehow remembered how to do the basics. We had to learn about atoms one the periodic table and how when different atoms and properties are mixed it can make a different product. We had to apply that knowledge to our game and we had to show that we learnt something from the experiments and tests that we conducted.

How Did We Make The Game?

We constructed our video game using scratch and at first it was difficult and hard, but then I got the hang of it and started to make some progress when… the IMPOSSIBLE happened. I got logged out and my whole entire game deleted and I had no way of fixing it. I was devastated. I had to start from scratch (no pun intended) and I decided to read through some instructions carefully but also have more ideas and input of my own into the game.

Trial and Error

For this project I had to try different things that I thought would work… but they didn’t most of the time. It was difficult and there were times when I wanted to stop and do something else, but I couldn’t, I had to find a different way to make the code work the way I wanted it to. I decided to search up tutorials on how to use scratch and how to make the sprites and code work the right way.

My Game!

You are trying to collect 10,000 elements and each one is worth 100 points. You are running away from a nucleus that is chasing after you. There are 3 of them. It communicates to my knowledge of atoms because I show the structure of the nucleus and atoms and what an element on the periodic table looks like.

Revisions and Reflections

We Had to get our game to get reviewed by two other classmates, this is what they said: “It worked smoothly and it looked really good, and it had a good premise and the idea was good.”
”I wish that there were multiple levels.” Overall, I think that it definitely introduces a more exciting and fun aspect of science to coding and even though it was stressful to make, it was a great way to demonstrate the concept of coding and science together. Thank you for reading and have a great rest of your day!!😁😀