Hello everyone! This is my blog post reflection on our last science project of this school year, called Comic Cells. The end goal for this project was to make a comic about how cells and diseases interact. But first, we had to learn more about cells.
To learn about what classifies something as living or non-living, viruses, and how cells are different from one another, we read textbooks, completed workbooks and quizzes, watched videos where the scientists explain information fast and complexly, and listened to the teacher talk.
For milestone 2 of our Comic Cells project, we had to research a disease, virus, bacteria, fungi or parasite and make a wanted poster for it. Everyone had the freedom to choose what they wanted to research which I thought was cool, but there were so many to choose from, and I actually wasted a lot of class time debating what disease I should star in my wanted poster. I was initially thinking Covid-19, and I started doing research about it, and there was a lot of information out there. But like many, I’m sort of sick and tired of Covid-19. We’ve been in a Covid-19 pandemic for over 2 years, with tightening restrictions and multiple waves of cases. So I tried finding a unique disease, one that not everyone already knew about. I finally chose “ALS” scientifically named Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The hardest part of creating the wanted poster about ALS, was coming up with what the image or drawing should be. This was hard because ALS isn’t like Covid-19 or other diseases caused by viruses, it isn’t caused by anything in particular, it just randomly shows up. When I was brainstorming drawing ideas for a corona virus wanted poster, I had the idea of making a virus body with a cowboy hat, guns, and cowboy boots. I kept this idea throughout, but had to be creative, and think outside the box, because the internet couldn’t help me find “ALS wanted poster drawing ideas”. Anyhow, in my research I learnt that ALS causes the motor neurons to die, so I drew a mysterious assassin killing some motor neurons. Check out my final ALS wanted poster below!
I used multiple tools to create this final product. I used Snapseed to edit the textured paper background, Sketches Pro to draw my illustration, and Canva & Keynote to add text.
Throughout this whole project, we’d been working towards creating a comic about how cells and disease interact. Before jumping straight into making our comic, we planed and did a peer critique of our storyboard plan. Here’s my storyboard plan:
I got some feedback from a classmate, and then a comment from Mr. Harris. He said that it was a sad ending, and that the character’s name shouldn’t change halfway through the story, but other than that it was a good storyboard. There wasn’t really a way to end my comic happy, because ALS has no proven treatment or cure. I made a few edits to my storyboard and then got to making the final copy.
In total we got about 2 full classes to work on and finish our comics, which I thought definitely not enough considering we had like 2 or 3 weeks to code a Scratch game, but I guess I just have high standards for the final products I create.
Here’s my final comic in image format. Flip through it! I think I could’ve improved it and explained more at the ending but I’m proud of the comic I created.
Or you can read the pdf version below.
I think that I didn’t use my class time always efficiently, and fell behind on some assignments like the wanted poster because I couldn’t decide if I should do research on covid-19 or something more creative and unknown. I included more than ten science/ cell vocabulary and I not only show the human character, but create a character dialogue where the neurons are dying inside the patient’s body.
I had wrote this blog post weeks ago but had never added media and published it on to my blog, it was just paragraphs in pages!
Thanks for reading and have a great summer break!