May 29

Capstone – #3 Site Visit

Today I had my site visit for Capstone at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I got a tour of fascinating things I had never seen before that had to do with my topic. 

The first tour that I experienced was at the lab where they research about DNA and cells. A really smart woman told me everything I needed to know about Genetics and it was amazing! The woman showed me all the machines they use to collect all of the information and the machines they use to discover new things they find from cells and DNA. One assistant that works there studies human cells that are in our body right now! There is something that looks like a freezer and they keep the cells in there at a specific temperature and when they need to examine something about it they take it out and put it under a special microscope so you could see clearly what the cells look like. The cells are too small to see with just your eyes. In fact, you can’t even see anything when you look at the cells. All it looks like is liquid. 

   

The second tour I experienced was with the same woman and she took us down to the basement where they have a whole room full of mice! When we got down there I didn’t realize there was a whole process to go into the room to see the rats and neither did my mom. But the process didn’t take a long time which was good. All we had to do was put booties on our feet, put a hair net around our hair, put a mouth mask on, put gloves on and put a cover/suit around us. (The cover almost looked like what scientist would wear). The process itself wasn’t weird, but the way we had to do the process was a bit weird but after they told me why we had to do it like that I understood.

The reason why we had to put all of that stuff on us was because since they were doing an experiment, they had a room full of mice for their experiment. The experiment is that they are taking the cells out of the rats and studying them. Because they are doing an experiment with mice, we had to cover ourselves because we didn’t want to get dirt anywhere and maybe we had dirt on us. Dirt and germs can mess up the experiment. In others words, it could make the rats sick and the rats are the main focus of the experiment. The process we had to do to put the stuff on us was in a room where there is a dirty spot where everybody walks, and on the other side it wasn’t dirty. There was yellow tape there so we knew what side was clean and what side was dirty. When we put the booties on, we had to put one booty on and step on the clean side of the room, then put the other booty on our other foot and step on the clean side of the room.

Then, we walked to the room where the rats were…they were sooo cute (but I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of them)!!!

I hope to learn more about his topic and come to this college again to get the experience I saw today!

May 29

Capstone – #2 Interview

Today I had my interview at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I interviewed a professor in the department of Genetics. I had 21 questions. Some of them asking about him and getting to know him a little. Some of them on Genetics and some questions about red hair and redheads. He worked on genetics and some of the questions that were about red hair and redheads were a little too complicated for him to answer because he didn’t study red hair and redheads but I think he did a very good job answering the challenging questions I asked him.

Questions/Answers:

Some of the questions and answers that I will be telling you is some that I like the most and that were very interesting to me:

Q#1 What inspired you to choose the field of genetics?

A#1 He said when he was a under graduate he did not know what to do. He didn’t know what interested him. He loved both biology and history. But then he said later on he wanted to go more deeper into biology instead of history specifically DNA. He went to a lecture by a famous immunologist who knew a lot about aging and he talked about damage to DNA that needs to be repaired. After that, he really got inspired by him and really wanted to study DNA and aging.

Q#2 What are some things you study in your lab?

A#2 He said in his lab he’s studying aging. In other words, getting older. He is also studying why when getting older you get sick and get diseases.

Q#3 What are some discoveries that were found in your work?

A#3 He said some discoveries that he found in his work was DNA changes during aging. He also found out that when cells can no longer provide enough protein for your body, that’s when diseases happen and form.

I found this interview really interesting and I learned a lot that I didn’t know before. It was also a great opportunity to see what it’s like to be a professor and a researcher in the department of Genetics!

March 20

Nerdy Derby

In school today these two people that work for a compony that do engineering work came into our school for a fun activity. They worked with each class in my grade. What we did was we designed cars and then we raced then on this mini “race track.” We got to work alone or with a partner. So I decided to work with my friend Audrey. Working together we made this awesome car. First, we got a mini wooden platform. Next, we got  2 tiny plastic tubes. Then, we got 4 wheels. After that, we got 2 tiny metal “tubes.”

Making The Car

First, we hot glued the plastic tubes onto the wooden platform. 1 on each side of the wooden platform. Then, we got the wheels and stuck 1 on each side of the medal “tubes” and then stuck that through the plastic tubes so they can roll down the track.

Now the whole car was put together and all we needed to do was decorate it!

In the box of all the materials, Audrey found pom poms and thought we could decorate the car by putting pom poms on the car and making it fuzzy. Then I suggusted we could put the pom poms in rainbow order. We did that and and it was awesome! On the sides of the car it was just white and we wanted to add something to make it better and we decided to write A (for Audrey) + S (for Samantha) = BFFs On the other side we drew three hearts and wrote BFF and then three more other hearts. Then we needed even more designs and color. We put a tiny pink piece of pipe cleaners on eacc of the other sides of the car. Finally, we had a perfect car!!

Now it was time to race! We won a few times but at the end we didn’t know what happened because we every time we raced someone else’s car, their car finished first or our car fell off the track. Audrey and I were a little disappointed but we loved our car. This was a rally fun activity and I really liked the car Audrey and I created!

October 12

Go Rocketry!

Our class has been working on rocketry. My group is Mia, Om, Alex and me. Our group name is Science Minds. We all have to work together to make a rocket that shoots up really high. You might be wondering how can we calculate how high the rocket goes? Well we do that by using a clinometer and a trundle wheel. They are used to  calculate something in the air and where to calculate it. The first step we did was make an inspiration board to inspire unique ideas for our rockets.  My group is different. We all have ideas that can go together to make an amazing rocket. Or first though is what colors are we going to make our rocket and what materials are we going to use? We knew that markers wouldn’t work so well so we decided to use duck tape. The colors we used were purple, yellow, black, blue and green. We all though that blue and green were “science colors” so that’s why we used those colors. For the fins, Om had an idea to cut wood and bring it in. For the nose cone we are 3D printing.

It was time to design what our rocket would look like. We grabbed a piece of paper and started to sketch the rocket we wanted to build. We all had amazing ideas. We had to measure where everything was going to go so we would know where to put the fins when it was time to build.

Preparing was our next step. We had to gather up all of the materials we wanted. Duck tape, rulers, scissors, wood, bottle, and our nose cone. Then organize where we are going to put it on the rocket. It got a little crazy with everyone getting materials and organizing but we could handle it.

Building was one of the hardest parts of this project. If we messed up we would have to do everything over again unless you could fix the problem. Duck taping was really hard. We had to cut the right amount and place it in the right place without it sticking to anything. Before we glue the fins to the rocket we needed to sand that bottle first. Next was hot gluing the fins to the bottle. Then we are going to 3D print the nose cone and then hot glue it to the top of the bottle so it is pointing upwards.

We did our first launch! It was so awesome! I was a little bit of both. Nervous and totally excited. Our rockets went so high. My groups rocket went the second highest out of the other groups in our class. I was still proud of my group. We are still not done with our rockets yet. We have a second launch to do and we have to fix up our rockets. My group is going to change our wings, nose cone, and the color of our rocket. The wings are going to be changed to our school colors which are yellow and black. The nose cone is going to be smaller to fit better and the color of it will be red. We also will make the nose cone transparent. The rocket will be covered in white duck tape. We are cutting out some pink hearts and details and putting them on the fin. I can’t wait to do the second launch and see who’s rocket goes the highest!

 

This picture is of my group and I. Mia is the one that is holding the rocket my group and I made.

This picture is what my groups inspiration board looks like. The post-its are for saying why we used the pictures we used and how they are helpful to us.

This is a video of Om launching our rocket in slow motion.

I made a photo collage and it has some photos of my class doing rocketry.

We also are doing an Isaac Newton Biography Infographic. An infograghic is something were you have information and pictures and them put them together. Then you make an infograghic. You might be wondering, “who is Isaac Newton?” Well he is a smart guy that discovered gravity and the 3 laws of motion. Isaac Newton is a big part of rocketry. Without motion, we wouldn’t be able to launch rockets. On the computer, we prototype an idea of what our infograghic will look like and we do the same on paper. Then when we think our infograghics are done, we print it out. That is the process on how we make our infograghics.