Author Archives: benjamins2016

IT 10 – Scratch Movie Scene Project

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https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/145717014/

While creating this project, I learned about hiding/showing sprites accordingly to how and where you want them to be.

A challenging aspect for me during this project was making the shooting animations and getting the sprites to move around like I wanted them to.

I think my project was unique because it combined a few different scenes from the James Bond movies over the years.

IT 10 – Scratch Game Project

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https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/143230512/

Controls:

Left = Left Arrow Key
Right = Right Arrow Keys

Objective: Stop all the balls from getting past you to the blue area. Catch them while you can.

 

During this project, I learned a lot about the general concept of coding with Scratch, and learning to think ahead and build all the scripts to work with one another.

One of the most challenging things of this project was getting the scripts to work together. A lot of the time when you added something new in, other things would stop working, or not work like they were supposed to. It was difficult to problem solve and get them all to work together.

 

Gene Mutation Story (Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis – ALS) – Science 9/COL

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Part 1

I was once a gene. Living the gene life. It was great. I just got to sit back, relax, and make protein molecules. I had a nice home. Lived in a great chromosomal neighborhood. To be specific, I lived in Chromosome 9p21.2. We genes are pretty tight within each other, you know. There wasn’t much else to do, it was a pretty slow life. Everyone in the chromosome knew everyone. All 25,000 of us. It’s crazy when you think about it.

All was going well, until one day. Me and my gene neighbor noticed that there was an extra gene that appeared. It was like he came out of nowhere, we didn’t know what happened. We didn’t know who he was but we knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.

For a while, me and all the other genes didn’t talk to him. He was different. None of the genes here were exactly the same, but we were alike in some ways, but this gene. He was was off.

None of the genes knew this at the time, but there were serious health implications to their human host.

The exact cause of ALS is unknown, but we know it is caused by a mutated gene adding, changing or deleting nucleotides, resulting in the production of a protein with altered or reduced function. The affect of this on the human host may include muscle spasticity and weakness, affecting movement in your body, causing difficulty chewing, swallowing, and breathing. Also causing slurred speech.

Part 2

In order to research this subject, I needed to search more in depth about genes and genetic mutation, to understand more regarding how a mutation is caused and what implications it may have. After that I researched about ALS from a general perspective, and started reading from several articles that proved to be credible, and only using published scientific documents through a university or research foundation. Within those articles I was able to find specific information about genetic mutation linked with ALS. Resources I used to get started with this process were Google Scholar and the Google search engine.

Although I had some trouble getting started with the process, overall I think the process went well, and I was able to complete the assignment and get all the information necessary that I needed.