Hello, I’m back. This time, I’ll be talking about our latest project in Scimatics, Meiosis Models. In this project, we learned about meiosis, mitosis and cell division.

We started this project by reviewing our knowledge of cell division from what we had learned last year. We also learned about CAD (computer assisted design) programs some more, particularity TinkerCAD, which I also have prior knowledge on due to a camp I took over the summer, and from last year when we did a project that also used the program.

The start of the project went by fairly quickly, and it mainly just revolved around workbooks and textbooks, which, if I’m being honest, were pretty boring.

This brings me to when the project started to get pretty interesting. For Milestone 4, we made 3D CAD models of meiosis and mitosis. I found this part to be interesting but it was a little annoying that we were confused to only doing models of meiosis and mitosis. Usually, whenever I mess around with CAD modelling software, I’m not limited to something specific, and it adds a cool layer of creativity over the project, and I felt like that wasn’t there during this project. Nevertheless, I still really enjoyed being able to use CAD software to demonstrate my learning. Here’s the models I made:

After that, we did some really interesting stuff with microscopes. We cloned garlic at the start of the project and once it had started to grow, we took the root tips, soaked them in hydrochloric acid, dyed them with a blue dye, squashed them down, and looked at them under a microscope. This was really interesting, as we could see all the individual cells. This was definitely my favourite part of the project. We then had to identify the cells in all the stages of meiosis and make a narrated video describing the cells and the stages of meiosis that they were in. I feel like my brain kind of put up a little barrier in this project with the thought of “when am I ever going to need this information and these skills in my life”, which I feel made me a little less enthusiastic about this project and in the future, I’ll try to kick that mindset. I also felt that I was getting distracted quite a lot during this project, which I’ll do my best to not to in the future. Here’s the narrated video:

That’s pretty much it. In conclusion, I had pretty mixed feelings about this project. I enjoyed the activities and experiments that we did, but I didn’t love what we were learning about. I just found it to be a little boring and pretty redundant. Nevertheless, I have high hopes for our next Scimatics project, “Time is Money”

I hope you enjoyed all 481 words of this blog post and I’ll see you next time.

Bye!

-Dylan