Thought 22: Comic Cells

How do cells and diseases interact?

Welcome to the final project of PLP 8. This project was all about cell interaction. We had the task of creating a comic book about cells, diseases and bacteria.

I chose to make my comic on how heart disease attacks your body and how you can prevent it. I decided that the story takes place in a reverse hospital, where the doctors are replaced with diseases who infect their healthy patients, for humour reasons.

I drew each of the panels in Sketches Pro. I am not a very good artist but I thought that Sketches Pro is a really good app for drawing and I would definitely use it again. We assembled the comic panels in an app called Comic Life. You can use Comic Life to arrange your panels, add speech bubbles and titles. It’s kind of like powerpoint but for comics.

For me, the most challenging part of this project was researching. It was difficult because I could not find the answers to my specific questions like “How does atherosclerosis fight against white blood cells?” and “What pharmaceutical drugs cause mitochondrial dysfunction?”

Finally, I finished my comic book and presenting it here

Core Competencies

Questioning and Predicting

This competency is about demonstrating curiosity in a scientific topic. I think that I exhibited this skill during my storyboard. Originally, I tried to come up with my own virus that attacks the heart by blocking the arteries, but I had realized that I was just describing heart disease and I rewrote the story.

Scientific Communication

The second competency is about expressing scientific information through forms of media. I showed this competency in my comic book when I explained the process and prevention of cardiovascular arrest.