Like we do most years in science, we just went through a unit about DNA. I’ve never really enjoyed this unit, as it is always a little confusing, and it’s not very appealing to me. But this was more about traits being passed down from parent to child, and what makes those certain traits pass down. We also were learning about twins and their DNA.

The driving question for this unit is:

“How does DNA and genetics determine the characteristics of living things?”

In this Unit  looked at what makes us different from each other as people, and how and why we look similar to our parents. We looked at how to predict what traits would be passed down from parent to child, and the probability of each. We also looked at genotypes and phenotypes, all before we started working on our project.

And once we got to the project stage, the driving question is:

It’s kind of strange to think about, and at first it sort of makes sense. But we jumped into a lot of learning and research. We learned even more about these following topics and fancy scientific words:

Genotypes and Phenotypes
DNA
Genes, Dominant and Recessive
Traits being passed down
Punnett Squares
Pedigree Charts
And much more

Me and Spencer, my partner for this project, needed to know all about these concepts before we started our project, which was to make a 5-10 minute podcast explaining the answer to the driving question. The podcast had to include the explanations of those words, and since in class we’d been going through this website that teaches us step by step about each of those, that’s what me and Spencer turned to to gather our information. We went through the information, picking out facts and important parts to use in our script. We also watched a few of this guys videos:

Once we’d gathered what we needed, we began turning the facts from bullet points into a podcast script. It didn’t take us long to put together, and we got to the recording stage fairly quickly. But before we got there, we proofread our script of course.

Our recording and music making was smooth sailing, we used GarageBand to record our voices and make the music, and iMovie to put all the recording clips together. But since it’s just a podcast, there wasn’t any visual we could use in iMovie, so the screen is just black. But it’s exported as a audio file.

 

Once we had our full version put together, we listened to it, balanced the audio a little, and then we were ready.

Overall, I was happy with the way it turned out, but I also felt I could’ve improved the grammar in some places to make it more engaging and easier to understand. I also would definitely add some humour of some kind in there somewhere to spice it up. This project, just like my math trigonometry one, was tough to get started on, but then once me and Spencer got going, it got easier. I had fun recording and just like all my podcasts and videos I’ve made, I enjoyed listening/viewing how it turned out in the end.

To sum up my learning in this unit, I have two visuals that help demonstrate how much I learned. At the beginning of the unit, we did a mind map of what we knew then, and then we did another mind map at the end of the unit, showing what we know now.

Before the unit:

I guess I have learned a lot in this unit, and it wasn’t too terrible. Overall the unit was interesting, and me and Spencer’s Podcast was good, so I’m happy about that.

Thats all for today,

 

See you