Week 7 Blog Post

 Olivia Langosch

This week I learned about DNA. I liked the activity (which is shown below) of putting the dot candy acting like the phosphate bases, and the twizzlers that acted the sugar backbone. I also learned that DNA is a double helix, and RNA is a single helix. 

I also learned about genotypes and phenotypes. The genotype is the genes that is in the DNA, and the phenotype is the physical features people have. For example, in the activity we did, which is shown below, we flipped a coin for dominant or recessive genes. If it was dominant, we put a capital letter. Lower case letters represent recessive genes. 

I already knew about genotypes and phenotypes because I remember really learning about this in middle school. We got to make our own monsters, and did something very similar to this activity. We flipped a coin and had the monster have that genotype, then we made a picture of all the features we flipped for. 

In the future, I will be doing activities like this because for the first activity with the candy, it's a fun and exciting hands-on activity for students to do, to get a better understanding of DNA. For the second activity, I think this is a fun way for students to get a better understanding of genotypes and phenotypes. I will be using these because I think my students would have fun doing these activities while learning.