The Comic

This project was centered around making a comic about an explorer, the explorers significance, and a virus or disease the explorer brought with them which resulted in infecting and most likely killing some natives. For my comic I decided to pick the explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado who’s expedition was land based. He was exploring the Southern USA.

At the start of the project we made mind maps of what we knew and the questions we had. My mind maps looked like this.

After we made the mind map we started working on some different assignments which were focused on us learning about the explorers and the diseases. They were the kind of work where you read, listen, and learn so I won’t show those to you.

After we did the assignments we started working on the actual project which was the comic. We started with the storyboard which is more or less a discount version of the comic with all of the defining points and just nothing to fill the gaps. It was a long process which took me a few hours to do but altogether not as hard as the comic itself.

The comic was the real hardship, mostly because of the drawing. The first picture of the comic is a good example of that. All it really is, is some tracings of a few things put together to make a portrait. I wanted it to look good and more or less spent the whole day drawing a person standing in a desert. It took me a while to get the time spent per drawing down to two hours and then even less. So because I spent so much time on the first ten drawings I would say that the average time spent per drawing was about two hours, maybe more.

Here is my comic:                                                                          (Click on the picture)

I hope you liked it, now onto the competencies and the driving questions.

First the driving questions, which were:

“What is the historical significance of your explorer?” and “How do cells and diseases/viruses interact?”

What is the historical significance of my explorer?

Some things of positive significance are that he and his expedition found a number of physical landmarks which are admired today.

Some negative aspects are that he disregarded the human rights of several members of his voyage and also killed a huge number of natives directly as he executed those who did not want to convert to Christianity and also indirectly, as one of the slaves on his expedition brought the influenza virus which natives were not immune to.

Now onto the second driving question

How do cells and diseases/viruses interact?

Viruses depend on the host cells that they infect to reproduce. Virus infects the host cell and uses it to multiply until the host cell dies. If the body survives the virus, it remembers it for the future. When the body gets attacked by the same virus another time, it can deploy antibodies to restrict virus from reproducing and eventually to kill it off.

Before Coronados expedition, the natives were never exposed to influenza virus before. Therefore their bodies did not produce any antibodies and the virus killed them. Those who survived were most likely immune.

Now that I’ve discussed the driving questions I’ll talk about the competencies. The competencies are, for Scimatics:

“Communicating: Communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems, using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies”

I think I did this well and I communicated my scientific findings, even if I didn’t say all of them I communicated the ideas in a way that the average reader could understand.

For Humanities: “Communicating: Communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems, using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies”

Throughout the comic I used proper grammar and wrote everything grammatically correct. I also displayed the historical factor of the comic well and made the explorers life and story well.

Connecting: “How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?”

I can connect the text and stories to now and where I live and things around me. For example I connected the discovery and ever higher amounts of trade with the USA, with the USA eventually becoming the worlds most prominent and powerful country, only recently to be overtaken by China which hadn’t changed its ways for thousands of years and then being struck by a rapid industrialization and rapid economic growth.

Conclusion

I learned a lot and had lots of fun from this project. It taught me a lot about the Era of Exploration, and how cells and diseases interact. It was very much a fun project but something I had quite a lot of trouble with was the comic which took me way to long for what it was. I’m a slow and lousy drawer and it takes me too long to draw pictures. For next time I think that the option of writing a book or a short story should be also welcome because some of us are just better at it. That’s all, thanks for reading, and goodbye.