Semester 2 Reflection

During science this semester, I have developed various skills through our lab experiments and research. This semester, we worked through our physics unit and biology unit. This is a reflection of how much I have grown as both a scientist and learner this year.

In the biology unit, I practiced the desired student learning outcome(DSLO) of collaboration. This was when we had to dissect a cow's eyeball. I practiced this skill because to dissect this eyeball I had to collaborate with my partner to ensure that both of us were splitting the work equally but also doing the work correctly. In addition, I believed that it was important for both of us to understand the steps we were going through, not just blindly following directions. It was evident that my partner and I both understood and learnt a lot about the dissection of a cow's eyeball in this document, where we realised the purpose of parts of the eyeball and compared them to a human's eyeball.

Dissecting a cow's eyeball

My collaboration also improved this semester because I got to know my peers much better since we had all of the first semester to get to know each other. This helped me feel more comfortable when talking during labs so I asked more questions which enhanced my knowledge. This applied to several labs in which we had to collaborate in to achieve a common goal. For instance, when we had to extract DNA from a wheat germ, I had to trust my partner since this was a delicate procedure, as you can tell from this document. This semester, it was much easier to put my trust in my partner and collaborate to complete this procedure correctly.

During the biology unit, I not only practised the DSLO of collaboration but also that of cultural competence. This is because when we discussed about genetics, cloning was a touchy topic. Some believed that people should be allowed to create clones while other's completely opposed the idea. Therefore, I had to ensure that I respected both opinions and took into factor the ethical morals of doing such a thing. We went deep into this topic and even viewed examples in nature, Hollywood, and the science lab, as you can see in this document.

While I have written a lot on biology, in addition to this unit, we also had our physics unit. For our very last project, we had to create a mouse-trap car(a piece of wood with DVD wheels that moved because of the force a mouse-trap created). This project really tested my creativity, one of the DSLO's. This is because my partner and I had to come up with a way to make our car move a long distance which was difficult considering our materials. In the end, we decided to use a triangle design which wasn't a very original idea, but we had to be creative on how to make it work. 

As you can tell from above, I have improved a lot this semester. My ability to collaborate with my peers, my creativity, and cultural competence, have all grown, thus not only making me work better in a science lab but improve me as a learner!