Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Make a Baby
Last week in our class, we made babies.  Well, not real babies, but make believe babies.  At first, our professor listed off characteristics of our face in two categories a piece, which included a round face or a square face, a chin dimple or no chin dimple, if we have thick lips or thin lips, and so on.  If we answered with what the dominant trait was, for example, a round face is the dominant allele listed, then would would have to flip a coin to determine if the allele was going to be homozygous--two large alleles--or heterozygous--have one large allele and the other small, which would be a carrier for square face.  Once that process was over, we compared genes with the corresponding parent.  If both parents had either a homozygous dominant or homozygous recessive, that was what our kid would have.  If either of us had a heterozygous, we would flip a coin to determine if the gene going to be passed was going to be the dominant or recessive gene.  For example, Say we had Aa for chin dimple.  When we flipped the coin and it turned out to be heads, the large A would be the gene passed down.  In order to determine which sex our child would be, we flipped a coin.  It was heads, which passed down an X from the father, making our child a girl.  Our daughter has a round face (Rr), a noticeable chin (Nn), an absent chin dimpe (Aa), no freckles (ff), no cheek dimples (dd), thick lips (Tt), fine eyebrows (bb), wide eyes (Ww), long eyelashes (Ll), long ear shape (Rr), free ear lobes (ff), an absent widow's peak (ww) straight hair (C2C2), eyebrows darker than her hair color (D1D1), close eye width (W1W1), medium sized eyes (S1S2), medium sized mouth (M1M2), a medium sized nose (P1P2), no facial birthmark (B2B2), a light skin tone (S1S1), blonde hair (aaBB), and her eyes are a greenish brown (AaBB).  All of these characteristics put together create a princess of a daughter.
In addition to the information I learned about how genetics worked through this experiment, I thought it was pretty accurate, too.  The odds of passing down either a dominant or recessive gene is about the odds of flipping a coin - 50/50.  All in all, I thought the experiment was really enjoyable, and I would love to incorporate an experiment similar to this in my classroom.  A way that this could be more appropriate for more upper elementary kids would be to maybe give them two animals and use their given genetics to create their offspring.



Our daughter is pictured on the left, which is her 5th grade school picture, and the boy pictured to her right is her future husband, with which she was arranged to marry at a young age.

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