Creative Assignment Guidelines
Introduction and Goal: Communicating science information to a general audience is essential for people to gain interest in science and combat misinformation. Scientific jargon is a barrier for people outside of the field and scientists constantly need to think of ways to convey concepts without jargon. This assignment wants to you explore your creative side and help you learn how to communicate science to broad audiences, as it has been shown that learning to communicate concepts to a broad audience can enhance learning (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23471252/).
You are to create a visual/interactive way to convey a cell biology topic to a general audience. It can take the form. of a short comic strip (e.g. 4-6 panels), a couple well-thought out memes or GIFs, an informative social media post (e.g. Instagram carousel of 4-6 images), a short TikTok/Instagram reel (1-2 minutes), etc. We will allow image, PDF, GIF and video formats for submission. Submissions can be hand-drawn or created digitally (e.g. canva) if submitting images. If you have an idea that is not covered here, please discuss with the instructor before going ahead with it.
Formatting Guidelines: APA 7th edition, you must reference any resources you use to create your assignment. You should have 1 primary research reference at minimum.
What topic should I choose?
Anything related to cell biology! You are able to pick any topic area that is interesting to you, as long as your submission is unique.
You can refer to topics covered in our BIOC10 class or anything you found interesting from BIOB10, as a starting point. You could also use any cell biology topics recently featured in the media as a starting point as well.
Potential topics:
https://www.nature.com/subjects/cell-biology
Additional example topics not in the screenshot:
- Stem cells
- Cancer
- Extracellular matrix
- Cell junctions
Examples of suggested formats:
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/opinions/062321/building-a-scientific-community-one-meme-at-a-time
https://sites.wp.odu.edu/dowdy-psyc304/2020/11/22/cell-bio-meme/
https://theawkwardyeti.com/?s=cell+biology
http://www.beatricebiologist.com/?s=cell
https://www.amoebasisters.com/gifs.html
https://www.amoebasisters.com/parameciumparlorcomics/category/cells
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