Our PLP cohort was finally somewhat like a regular class! We did a science project that didn’t involve creating a video! Our science project was a podcast.. ya, not a regular class at all, scratch that.
As always we were basing our project around a driving question. How does DNA and genetics determine the characteristics of living things?
We started off with learning about DNA and genetics. Starting with the basics, what DNA looks like, a twisted ladder, and what it’s made of. In case you were wondering or can’t remember anything from your grade 9 and 10 math class it involves phosphate, sugars and 4 nitrogenous bases, A, T, C and G. Or “At Carson Graham” is how anyone in Ms. Pye’s science class remembers them. Now for the genetics half of it we learned about genetic makeups, phenotypes, (your physical traits) and genotypes (the code that gives you these traits, Hh, HH, hh). Those weird H’s are symbols for recessive (little h) and dominant (big H) genotypes. Dominant genes will always take over,they’re pretty self explanatory, an example is brown eyes. They’re much more common than green or blue eyes, which are recessive genotypes.
This is just a snapshot of what we learned. All of our learning came off of a website that was already set up and had steps that would help answer that driving question. If you want a quick flashback to high school sciences, go have a look at this learning guide.
On to the not so normal science project!
For this project I would be working with one of PLP’s new students, Hannah. The hardest part of this for us was porobably figuring out what sort of style we wanted to do. We began with doing a simple discussion of the topic that would eventually lead to us “figuring” out the answer. Then it went to one of us being, lets just say dumb, and not really knowing anything and the other being a genius who was trying to explain the topic to the, not so intelligent one. We finally settled on doing an expert interview style where it would have a host and a guest, the expert who was being interviewed. From there we had to write the script, which didn’t take much thinking since we already had all of the information from our work throughout the unit. Script done, style picked, from here on out it’s simple, all we had to do was record, edit, and we were done!
(Video temporarily unavailable to due some technical difficulties, aka me not having the podcast from Hannah yet…)
In the end, this unit helped clear up some questions I had about DNA. I also learned some new interesting stuff along the way, as well as improving my recording and editing skills as always. To show our learning this year, our new PLP teacher is having us complete a midmap with all of the information we learned from the unit so here’s mine to wrap up this DNA and Genetics unit.
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