My module on Day 4 was like my baby… I was super excited to teach about biology, DNA, and bacteria! After hoisting 100 petri dishes and some colorful bacteria to the school, we began the lesson for the day with a discussion about what it means to be alive. The kids had some good ideas related to growing, breathing, and having cells. I showed some basic criteria for living things and pointed out that they are sometimes hard to see… for example, most students thought plants don’t move… but then I showed a GIF of plants moving towards sunlight! To instill these concepts further we played a game where I showed a picture and then students had to decide whether or not that thing is alive. At each table Lulu, Sheila, and Sarah helped lead small discussions for each one. There was actually a lot of conflict… most people knew that fossils aren’t alive, but fire and wood really tripped people up. When I asked if viruses are alive, one student, Mark, who had been relatively quiet all week, got super committed to the “non-living” viewpoint after remembering what he had learned in class and a lively debate ensued (Mark literally stood up… and he wasn’t asleep!). It’s really nice to see students get engaged about a subject that they find interesting!!
We next went over some of the different parts of the cell, and I introduced the students to my friend Bobby Joe (a cartoon man), who, of course, is made of cells. Using Sheila’s tactic of calling on kids in the class to translate my English sentences was super useful, as it confirmed the Korean meaning for the kids and got some of the quieter students more engaged. The kids tried to calculate how many times their cells would wrap around the Earth if you place them end to end and literally corrected my answer since I was missing a zero (haha yikes).
After talking about human cells, we started looking at bacteria cells. Each student got petri dishes and made handprints to try to grow the bacteria on their dirty hand. They then cleaned their hands with hand sanitizer, and made another handprint on a different section of the plate! On a different plate the kids sampled bacteria from different parts of the room… of course chaos ensued with students swabbing their feet, mouths, and even nostrils… ooph, at least they are having fun. It will take a bit of time for the bacteria to grow, but during our Monday module, we will use microscopes and image processing to compare the amount of bacteria in different cases #science #engineering #connections #wow
Once all of the plates were placed to “incubate” on a warm section of the floor, we moved on to talk about DNA (which luckily is DNA in Korean, not ADN like in Spanish… bruh). With the motivating example of saving Bobby Joe from a genetic disease, we set out to figure out how to extract the DNA from a strawberry. Each table ran an experiment using a model cell membrane (an oil layer in water) to figure out what chemical could break the cell membrane. When a charged blue dye passed through the “cell membrane” treated with soap, they realized that soap can break cell membranes! Using this knowledge, we went on to break the strawberry cells open and precipitate the DNA with isopropyl alcohol… and got some seriously good yield.
With that, it was time for lunch. It is so hard to gauge how long each module will take. Luckily, Sarah was willing to let the rest of my bacterial module take up the first bit of her afternoon Scratch module. After lunch, the students used were introduced to bacteria painting! They sketched their designs in their notebooks and then used red, white, and yellow bacteria to trace their designs onto petri dishes! It was a bit tricky, since you can’t see the bacteria at first (it takes them a few days to grow up), but the kids got the hang of it soon. Some students were very creative with artsy designs and cute characters and some students were satisfied with 4 lines to make a tree.
Once bacteria were finally over, we headed downstairs and Sarah led the kids on a Scratch adventure. They all picked their characters and started coding them to move with the drag and drop platform. It took a little bit of time for some students to get the hang of coding, but pretty soon they were controlling their characters with the arrow keys. One student, Daniel, had done Scratch previously and was very interested in coding, so we got him set up to learn Python! Sarah led another student, Michelle, through the process of making a Flappy Bird game (except Michelle decided to make Flappy Cat). Cindy made an exhaustive animation between a prince and a princess, with text boxes and all. Sheila and I helped George Washington make a 2 player soccer game. Grace was creating an Iron Man at MIT animation while James… made lots of random objects flying around the screen. 🙂
After the workshop ended, Sarah and I collapsed on our beds. Lulu went on an adventure to get Epoxy Resin to prepare for materials science day tomorrow. Sheila went shopping for many eggs for egg drop tomorrow, and replenished our ever diminishing supply of food. The rest of the night was spent prepping for the next day… For some reason nobody countered my bold, but brave, idea of putting an egg in the epoxy resin, so our 1 materials day test run was left looking like the Chinese Flag gone wrong 😦 Sheila made a demo Rube Goldberg machine for tomorrow that worked out really well! Our apartment be looking like a mess!!
GTL Korea 2020 