During this last little while in science we’ve been learning a lot about pathogens, microorganisms, the immune system and a lot of other stuff like that. The first keystone was the Field Journal. During this assignment we did an experiment in which we swabbed different items which we thought could contain a lot of bacteria such as like areas in the bathroom or commonly used items such as the doorknobs on some of the classrooms. After that we wiped our swabs on little Petri dishes and then sealed them with tape to see what kind of growth we would get in them and what kind of bacteria we would find. As for me, I went and swabbed the door handles at the front of the school because a lot of people touch them when they enter and leave the school. At first there weren’t really any signs of growth on my Petri dish, it looked like this:

 

 

 

 

 

But as time went on a lot of growth started to form, especially after like day 5, there were like all kinds of white spores and little puddles of bacteria which concluded my prediction that commonly used objects generally have more bacteria than uncommonly used objects. Also this is what my Petri dish looked like after day 5:

 

 

 

 

Next we started to look at the immune system a bit more, we started looking at macrophages, white blood cells, t-cells, etc… And as for keystone 2 we had to create immune system character cards for the following: white blood cell, any type of t-cell, the macrophage, any type of b-cell, and the antibodies. For each card we had to talk about what each of them do, where they live in your body and then give an analogy for each of them like the antibodies are like a tasty sauce which are spread on the pathogens to attract the macrophage (antibodies analogy). These are what all of my immune system characters look like:

Now as for the last and final keystone we had to create a Canva document talking about some of the vaccine myths and biases in partnered groups. I worked with James and the 2 of us decided to go for the myth that vaccines cause infertility and negative side effects like that. We managed to show and provide evidence debunking this popular theory showing countless doctors giving very descriptive evidence to how this is not possible. This is the Canva vaccine myth document:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this concludes the Small but Mighty term for science. Overall I do think that this was a really cool subject to touch upon. I’ve always been interested in bacteria and viruses and always thought it would be really cool to learn about that kind of stuff. I especially enjoyed the experimentation part, where we grew bacteria from swabbing objects but overall I thought the whole term was really cool and I hope to look at this stuff again one day.