Crime Scene Investigation
In this project, we all got into partners and had to investigate and mock crime scene and go about the crime scene like actual investigators would. We used forensic sciences such as forensic entomology, blood typing, DNA processing, casting, and finger printing. Throughout the process, we had to make educated guesses and assumptions to lead us further into the investigation with the evidence we were provided with.
Project Reflection I really enjoyed this project. I thought it was really fun to branch away from making meals and dissecting animals and do something that required logical thinking and really in depth interactive learning. I loved being a crime scene investigator for the length of the project. My favorite part was when we were doing DNA processing, and I even did electrophoresis publicly for final exhibition. My partner and I worked extremely well together in dividing up the work evenly and fairly. We worked really well in understanding each other and figuring out when to pick up each other's slack and when to assist each other through parts. I think that the collaboration between me and my partner was one of my favorite parts. I did a lot of the processing of the evidence, giving logical reasoning and doing the logistics of it all, while Connor did a lot of the hands on work and helped me get to the second part of analyzing the evidence. I'm leaving this project feeling like Connor and I would be a pretty good CSI team.
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Community Connection
For my community connection, I volunteered at a blood drive Animas was hosting. The United Blood Services came down and set up in the commons, and called upon student donors and student volunteers to help move it along. What I did was I would check people in, make sure they took their online questionnaire, made sure they rested for fifteen minutes before leaving the commons, made sure they drank and ate plenty of food and water. My job was simple, but I had an opportunity to see what the process of donating blood was like and I was able to socialize with a lot of people and get to know some people. I found it to be pretty fun, and I enjoyed it. I'm hoping that someday, I can donate blood and be more connected with the community that way.
Dissection
For my dissection project, I did something a little different than the rest. It's against my personal morals to dissect an animal, even if they died of natural causes and sent to a science lab for this purpose. So instead of dissecting an animal, I got into a small group and made a tape body of a person. Each of us studied a system of the body, and then we started creating what we were going to show off as our "dissected" person. My partner, Calvin, was making the lungs as a part of the respiratory system, Noah was figuring out how to make internal organs as a part of the digestive system, and I went through a long process to create the brain. We tried putty, foam, and then eventually got plaster into the mold. We then decorated the body, and presented our body as a dissected thing just as everyone with a real animal would.
Monkey Meal Planning
For this project, we studied primates and monkeys and what they are able to eat. Our goal was to create a recipe book to give to a primate center to give their monkeys and animals. Multiple students chose to do challenge options which included learning what IBS, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome is and what it's like in spider monkeys, then made a recipe to better suit the needs of a monkey with IBS. I chose to do that challenge extension, and I'm hoping I made a little spider monkey happy with my meal.
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Durango Nature Studies Habitat Assesment ProjectDURANGO NATURE STUDIES HABITAT ASSESSMENT PROJECT
Reflection
For this project, the now sophomore class studied the bullfrog and the leopard frog, and most especially the local threat posed to the leopard frogs. We studied how to identify amphibians, and soon went to Durango Nature Studies and conducted water quality tests, caught and tagged frogs, and a small group of people stood atop the hill and observed the environment. After we did that, we returned with a lot of data, so Colleen walked us through how to take our data and put it into excel, make sense of it, and what the Shannon Wiener Diversity Index is and how to use it. We all made individual graphs and tables, and I took two challenge extensions to collect more data and compare the data from the last few years. Once that was done, we started a technical writing piece, talking about what DNS is, an overview of the species we studied, data, our suggestions to Durango Nature Studies, and cited from scientific publishings.
I'm personally proud of myself because I'm more of an expressionist, and this was a challenge to do because it was just so hard to put my brain in a technical state. However, my grade for this wasn't as high as I was hoping, so I'm no proud of all the mistakes I hadn't noticed in all of my writing. In the next project, I aim to work harder and definitely read over my writing more than I did previously during this project.
I'm personally proud of myself because I'm more of an expressionist, and this was a challenge to do because it was just so hard to put my brain in a technical state. However, my grade for this wasn't as high as I was hoping, so I'm no proud of all the mistakes I hadn't noticed in all of my writing. In the next project, I aim to work harder and definitely read over my writing more than I did previously during this project.