We have just finished another science project that was based on learning about cells, bacteria and the hidden heroes in our bodies!
Driving Question 🏎️
How does our knowledge of cell biology contribute to public health?
This was our driving question for this project and I feel this is my answer to it:
Our knowledge of cells, bacteria and vaccines can help us contribute to public health by just knowing it works and that it’s real! There are many people out there who believe they don’t work (Anti-Vaxxers) But they don’t know the toll that not taking vaccines can take on your health and others around you! I also feel that if you are doctor and understand cell biology that it can help develop vaccines for deadly diseases (small-pox, Covid-10, Polio).
There are many different answers to this question as well so you should go and read some of my other classmates blog as well!
Launch 🚀
To start off our project we really started to try to think about gross things that might gather lots of bacteria on them such as…
Toilets
Sinks
Tables
Phones
Pencils?
The reason we were doing this and thinking about all the bacteria was because we were going to start swabbing and growing bacteria ourselves!
To do this we needed to come up with our own question that swabbing the bacteria would solve. My question was “Which bathroom is cleaner? Boys or girls?” Now I didn’t go in the boys bathroom I am not stepping foot in there (even though I did try to convince my friends to dress up as guys and go in for me 😅) in the end I got Oliver to do it for me.
Petri Dishes
Here are my Petri dishes and I decided to swab the sink the door knob and the mirror in both the girls and boys bathroom. These are my Petri dishes at the end of the experiment as you can see, THEY ARE DISGUSTING! We took photos and a log of what they look like each day in what is called a field journal. You can see mine below! ⬇️
Every person had a different question and that means different results Fr everyone! It was really cool and gross seeing all the other dishes! After a while the tub of dishes started to stink… Like A LOT! 🤢
Field Journal 🔎
This journal was very fun to make and I actually really enjoyed this part of the project, but we are not done yet!
Cells
We learned so much about the cells! To start we learned by watching lots of presentations on little stories our amazing teacher Ms. Kadi had made! We even made one ourselves at the very beginning here is mine and Elsa’s!
Some cells we learned about are:
T-cells
B-cells
Macrophage
Antibodies
White Blood Cell
We learned about these specific ones because they are all essential for our immune systems to function! Learning about the cells was really fun and I hope I can use this knowledge as I grow as a learner!
Vaccines
There are 4 kinds of vaccines that doctors and medical specialists have developed to help us fight diseases! Not all diseases have the same kind of vaccine because the way the vaccine has been developed is to protect you from the germs and bacteria causing the disease.
1. Inactivated vaccines:
An inactivated vaccine is created by taking a virus or bacteria and killing it (with poison) so that it cannot harm the body anymore. The immune system can still detect the foreign invaders after it has entered the body so when the real active thing enters the body we will already have antibodies to fight against it.
2. Live, Attenuated Vaccines
These vaccines are made with weakened bacteria and viruses. They are made weak enough so that they cannot harm the body but are not killed. The immune system can still detect the foreign invaders after it has entered the body so when the real active thing enters the body we will already have antibodies to fight against it.
3. Subunit Vaccines
These kind of vaccines are made by taking a small or cut up piece of a virus or bacteria so cut up that they are dead and cannot cause harm to the body. The way the body can still tell what kind of disease it may be is because they all have certain characteristics that make them look like themselves!
4. mRNA Vaccines
To me the mRNA vaccine is more complex than the others. Ribosomes are really good at taking recipes and working with our nucleus to make copies of the bacteria and viruses. The mRNA is like a copy of the diseases DNA. The immune system can still detect the foreign invaders after it has entered the body so when the real active thing enters the body we will already have antibodies to fight against it.
Characters
Those 5 cells I mentioned earlier were going to stay with us a little while longer because we were tasked with drawing characters that represented them in some way! I decided to do Winnie The Pooh characters I did this because WTP was my childhood and also I just love it! I also decided to do it in the form of a job resume like they are applying for a job in the immune system and telling you their greatest qualities. (And no I didn’t draw them from scratch I traced them… I’m not that talented 😅)
Media Campaign
The media campaign was to see how we can incorporate our knowledge of advertisements and get the message through to younger audiences. The reason this was a media campaign is because spreading a message through the media is faster than going door to door or talking to people one by one. We addressed some problems and false beliefs about vaccines and decided to use the idea of false accusations against vaccines as our main focus. Some accusations were/are:
Vaccines give you autism
Vaccines contain harmful chemicals
Vaccines turn you into cows (back into the 1700s)
Here are my media campaigns that I created against the accusations:
These are the campaigns that I feel display the the wrongness in the accusations I mentioned earlier. I used the autism one more because I felt that was the stupidest reason to not get a vaccine (not as stupid as thinking you would turn into a cow).
Reflection
This project has been really interesting because even though science is a PLP class and PLP is based on group projects we didn’t do that! I feel it was really interesting working in this environment but not in a group like our past projects.
I really loved this project because it had so many different things that we did to show our learning! For example we used Petri dishes which is not something digital (even though we have a iPad available). We also did use the iPad with the field journal and we were tested with or organization of information and other aspects that would make it better or worse. With the drawings we used our Apple Pencil a lot. Doing this was interesting because I don’t remember drawing this much since the Bon-Voyage project!
Lastly with our advertisement campaigns we had to use our again, organizational skills and we had to find a way to get our message across a younger demographic. In conclusion this project has tested our skills and has let us experiment with different tools on our iPad and different parts of our brain. The cell is complex and I’m very proud of what this project has taught me!
Thanks so much for reading! (Im surprised you got all the way to the end) Stay posted for my next post! 👍