Comic Cells (!Last Blog Of Grade 8!) Scimatics Reflection

Hello everyone, welcome back to my last Scimatics blog for PLP-8! Lets get straight into what our project was about, we were challenged to make a comic, that explains how cells, virus, ect, interact with each other. Now, if you dont know every project in PLP has a driving question our teacher introduces to us at the beginning of every project. Then we are introduced to things that are called Milestones, Milestones get us one step closer to answering the driving question, then we have Stepping stones that help us get closer to answering Milestones. But we arnt going to get much into Stepping stones today as I will be showing you what I did for the Milestones and what my answer to the driving question is. The reason for a driving question is to DRIVE our project forward.

Now lets move onto Milestone 1: Milestone 1 we had to make a mind map with an app called MindNode. This is a routine that Mr. Gross dose with most Scimatics projects, lets see a picture of my fully completed MindMap:

Now onto Milestone 2: For Milestone 2 I was asked to make a disease wanted poster, this poster would decide what we want our comic to be about, I made my comic about Whooping Cough, but more on that later, here is a picture of my wanted poster:

Alright, lets move onto Milestone 3: Milestone 3 was the Kahn Academy test, for this test we basically had to do 2 quizzes, and 1 final test. This was one of the harder Milestones but in the end I got it done. This is also one of my least desirable Milestones.

Now onto Milestone 4: For MS4 we had to do a rough draft of our already finished comic, this was basically assigned to us so we could gather out thoughts and get some idea of what we are going to draw/wright about. We also did this so we could show our teacher what scientific language we would be using in the comic book. Here is a picture of my rough draft:

Milestone 5 I would consider to be our last Milestone for this project, for this we had to make our good copy of our comic book, this was by far the hardest part of the project and I ended up revising a lot of my comic book copy’s. Here is a link so you can check out my comic book (Note: I’m not the best drawer!) NOTE: Click on photo to be redirected to full comic book!

Now Milestone 6: All we had to do was just do our final reflection blog, the one you are reading now. So not that hard of a Milestone, all we have to do is reflect on our work.

Curricular Competencies:

Questioning and Predicting:
For this competency I think I did an accomplished job at questioning and predicting. Why, well for instance; I made sure to question my work when making my comic book, I told myself “Is this really my best work” or “What can I do better”. For the predicting part of this competency, I predicted I needed to do more then one copy of my comic book, so I kept extra ideas just in case I needed to re-do my comic and go with a different story plan.

Scientific Communication:
I also think I did an accomplished job at this competency, for example: When making my comic book, I made sure to use scientifically accurate language in my comic, and I also made sure to explain any sort of scientific related sentence so the viewer would not be left with unanswered questions.

Evaluating:
For my final competency, I think I did an accomplished job at evaluating, for instance: I made sure to use the most accurate evidence I could find and made sure to include as much evidence in my comic as possible, this way my viewers could appreciate all the evidence I included in my comic!

Overall, this project was acceptable, this was by far my least favourite project in Scimatics, I hate drawing on an iPad! It may seem easy, but its harder then drawing on paper. Not only that there was not as much math involved that I wished there would be, but overall I got it done and it was a little fun in the end. Now here is my answer to the driving question: “How do cells and diseases interact?” Well, as it turns out this is no easy question to answer, and there is many ways they interact with each other, so I will just give you an example of how bacteria effect cells. As it turns out sometimes bacteria multiply so rapidly they crowd out host tissues and disrupt normal function. Sometimes they kill cells and tissues outright. Sometimes they make toxins that can paralyze, destroy cells’ metabolic machinery, or precipitate a massive immune reaction that is itself toxic. Thanks for reading my final Scimatics  8 blog post, and stay tuned for my new and improved grade 9 blogs!