DNA Exoneration Project Reflection

We did several different activities in class to get started with getting to know how to process DNA. About 3 of the activities were done on a computer. It was sort of like a game but also gave you informational buttons and steps to follow.  These steps showed you how to find certain criminals and steps to figure out which criminal or when/where it took place. These 239 people who were wrongfully convicted are lucky to be living in this century with all of the new technology to figure out that they were not guilty. 

Our project was based on a person named Ellis Wayne Felker. He was wrongfully accused of the rape and murder of a woman.  His original date to be executed was moved forward giving him a few extra months of hope but in the end he was killed. After he was killed is when they found out he did not commit the crime he was put in jail for, for 12 years. He was executed with the electric chair. To show this we put his taped body to a chair and put lights in him to represent the electric feel and connected these wires to his head. The project came out really well and turned out exactly how we wanted. It had a scary feel to it, imagining that your body was full of lights that would shock you. This was our goal.

The most memorable thing that I learned from this project would be how many people are put into prison for something they didn’t do. It scares me that our system works like that and that things as crazy as that happen.  Before doing this project I had just seen a movie called ‘The Life of David Gale.’ This movie is about how a man got convicted for something he didn’t do. In the end, he dies to stand up for something he believes in and nobody knows he wasn’t guilty until he was dead. I didn’t know things like this actually happened but now I do.  My partner and I weren’t completely on the same schedule for this because of sports and so he would have to do things without me and I would have to do things without him but in the end we were both very happy with how everything turned out.  If I could do this project again, I would do a lot more research on the actual DNA processing. I don’t feel like I got as much out of it as a possibly could and wish I had in the science aspect of it. 

Project Reflection

Many weeks before this part of the project we did small activities that would help us learn more about the different types of systems before doing the actual project. One of these activities was called “Mr. Goodbody.” During this activity we traced somebody out of the groups we were assigned and described everything inside the body such as the heart, blood vessels and bones.

During this project we were assigned groups and also assigned a different part of the body to study, make a project about the body part and also a website explaining the system you were assigned.  The purpose of this project was to learn about the different systems in our body and mostly get to know the one you were assigned well. Another overall goal for this project was to teach the person visiting your website something they didn’t know before they had read it.

Before organizing who was in which groups we, as students got to decide the order of what systems you wanted to be in from least to most desired. The nervous system was one of my higher choices and that is what I ended up getting. Another choice we got was what role we wanted to have in our group which consisted of the researcher, creative media, community connection, and the interviewer. With each of these different jobs in our group we were given the task of making a website.

My job ended up being the interviewer. The responsibility’s that I was given with this role was to interview a professional on the nervous system. I ended up interviewing Dr. Youssef, he is an orthopedic doctor at Mercy Medical Center. Doing this helped because it was good to get some input from the real world and it also helped me understand why it was so useful to know the different body parts especially if your planning on going into a medical profession.

 It is a good skill to be able to communicate with the real world and talk to them about something your interested in and this I believe is something I did well because I got ahold of a professional  and interviewed him personally with well thought our questions. Something that I would change in this project would be the organization on how to do things. I had a lot of trouble on how to upload my recorded interview to our website and it would have saved me time if we knew how to do that in advance. On the next project I m going to try to stay more organized and hopefully that will help me improve the quality of my work. As I said, this project really helped me improve doing stuff on my own because I had to set the interview up and make it happen. Knowing how to do this is important because we need to be able to communicate with the world and make things happen.
This is our website:
http://are-you-nervous.webs.com/

Biology.

The science of life or living matter in all its forms and phenomena, especially with reference to origin, growth, reproduction, structure, and behavior.

The point of having a Biology blospot page is to record all of our guest speakers and also just to have a written understanding of everything we are doing in our Biology class.

This is the link to my Biology page:

http://corakilgo.blogspot.com/