Round up: December 28, 2015

Dear AP Bio, do you still remember the Google World Map we created together on the first day of school? I still remember the excitement exuded from all of us as we entered the most memorable place in the world, with the hope to use this as a chance to know each other better.

Looking back, that's the mark of the beginning of our journey and from that point on, we've walked each other through 6 seasons, exploring the fascinated World of Biology, and came to recognize the indispensable contribution each member made to our unbreakable community in which every members has an intregral part.

In season one, we built the foundation for our journey as we explored the Characteristics of Life, the uniqueness of water and the importance of Carbon in organic chemistry. I still remember the day when Mrs.Girard brought a special guest--fire--to help us differentiate between what's alive and what's not alive to make the class more dynamic and memorable.

In season two, we became fascinated with the job of the cell membrane which is semi-permeable and controls the passage of certain substances in and out of cell. We also came to realize the indispensable role enzymes play in our body as they lower the activation energy, thus enabling the chemical reaction to take place, such as the glucose uptake by cells and blood clotting on a wound.

In season three, we challenged ourselves by entering Breakthrough Junior Challenge and used this as a chance to research on our favorite topics. It's interesting that we covered such a broad range of topics and we learned so much from the tutorial videos each one of us made. In Eden's tutorial video on Diabetes, I became engrossed with the difference between Diabetes 1 which is hereditary and Diabetes 2 which is influenced by unhealthy life styles and acquired bad habits.

In season four, we explored two processes that are most intrigal to our lives and the ecosystem--Cellular respiration which all organisms use to break down food to provide energy for basic activities and Photosynthesis which plants use to convert light energy to chemical energy. Do you still remember the game we played to save Jared's lives because of the malfunction of electron chain during his cellular respiration process? Do you also remember the two  games we created to help us review the concepts?

Then, we jumped into a relaxing season where we learned the Cell Signaling from the case study "my dog is broken" while at the same time delving deeper into Mitosis and Meiosis. The Meiosis animation videos we created are amazing!!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRc-sccIsuE]

Last came the summit of our semester--the genetics. I could see every one was so engrossed by this season because genetics explain to us the genes that relate us with our ancestors and offsprings. The medical family pedigree enabled us to wonder at the pattern of heredity of each genetic disease or abnormality. Finally, we ended this semester with the genetic symposium which enables us to gain a deeper understanding about different genetic disorder. Since most of us want to venture into medical field in the future I think this project is especially beneficial as it enabled us to experience the emotional aspect concerning each disease as we interviewed patients, doctors, or researchers who recounted to us the vivid first-hand experience when dealing with the disease.

While we are exploring in the rigorous academic field, we are also leaving behind our digital footprints along the way, hinting on our personalities, our fascination with technological advancement and our observations about trivial things through the delicate use of words.Knowing that our blogs will be seen in public, each one of us tried to polish our digital presence to the best of our ability, correcting all the grammar mistakes and trying to insert many pictures or videos to fascinate our potential readers.  Exploring every blog is like exploring in Alice Wonder Land and we can easily get lost in the words of thoughts. The blogs are essentially what's unique about this class in a sense that while they unite us they teach us how to be better at our writing and how to use fascinating technologies to embellish the black and white writing.

I am really looking forward to next semester because our journey together will become more amazing.