Microscopic adventure

Students helped find a baby whale’s parents through the use of lab equipment. During 4th period, a biology class mostly comprised of freshmen taught by Vanessa Morris-O‘Hearn went hands on and used lab equipment to go through the process of analyzing DNA. The students practiced using the pipette and made the gel where they would eventually put the DNA in the gel electrophoresis machine to analyze.

“Right now I don’t know what to pursue my career for but I am liking the subject about human anatomy,” Sophia Benavides, 9, said 

Students were tasked to use practice gel cases in order to get a feel for how it will be when they use the real gel while it’s in the machine to prepare it for the gel electrophoresis machine. These skills could help get a better understanding of how certain jobs would be in the STEM field helping them find something they could be interested in. Adam Olvera, a freshmen who is interested in animals, so labs like these help him get a similar idea of what he’ll be doing in the future.

“In the future I definitely want to pursue a career in zoology or animal genetics,” Olvera, 9, said.

With the assistance of Morris-O’Hearn they were able to put the DNA into the gel within the machine  and find the parents of the baby whale. Simulating a similar experience they may have in the future if they pursue anything similar that requires the analysis of DNA.

“I didn’t get to use one until college, so that’s a higher level skill that a lot of people don’t trust, you know, ninth graders with, so I want them to learn the skill, have a memory of a cool lab that’s different and than just a packet,” Morris-O’Hearn, said.