Immune Disorders

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Immune Disorders Objectives

Provide examples of immune cancers, including lymphoma and leukemia.
Describe the immunodeficiency disorders SCID and AIDS.
List the characteristics of a story that provides an engaging science experience.

We are starting with an overview of the major types of immune disorders.

Leukemia

Leukemias are cancers that arise in the bone marrow. Bone marrow contains the undifferentiated stem cells that are continually dividing to produce new cells.

AIDS

HIV leads to severe immunodeficiency by destroying helper T cells.

Science Stories

Often information about disorders is taught in a story format to convey complex information and the degree of impact on an individual.

Your final portfolio tells a story about some of what you have accomplished in this course. One of next week’s media pieces is writing a story on infectious diseases.

Science stories are used to communicate information in a form that can be understood by people with varied science backgrounds. This form of communication is critical in citizen science and science education. Information needs to be accurate, engaging, and tied to real-world experiences.

Effective stories engage attention, convey accurate science information, and create an experience for the recipient.

This slider shows nine characteristics that help a story engage attention, convey accurate science knowledge, and create an experience.

Engaging
Make sure your story can be understood: provide context, define words if necessary; offer something unique like your own perspective; and offer something that changes the recipient’s perspectives.
Science
Decide which concepts, skills, or connections you want to share, this will impact the story form you select.
Experience
Consider whether there is a way the story recipient can interact with the story. Is there something new to discover? Can they relate to the content? Can they use this information in some way?

Select a story form that matches your goals

Exploration

a field trip, finding something under the microscope, researching in the library, examining a topic through an artistic creation, gathering ideas

Description

providing details, an observation, using the senses, a scene, a sketch with labels, summary of an event, an experimental design

Explanation

an analysis, information in a context, experimental results, explaining a decision, comparing and contrasting

Directions

a how-to, instructions, a list, a map, calendar

Narration

a sequence of events, a process, cause and effect, before and after, fiction or non-fiction

Persuasion

making a case, defending a view, an opinion piece, arguing different points

Read over this short story and note how it is engaging (unique), over a science concept (hemoglobin) and a new experience for many people (Triops).

Many people are adopting pets, one of our new favorites is our single Triops that hatched from an egg six weeks ago. It is one inch end-to-end and has learned to hover upside down until it is fed. Even though it’s life span averages eight weeks, it has a broader range of behaviors than we anticipated, including “begging” for food and chasing snails in the tank.

The overall red color is hemoglobin protein, the same protein that carries oxygen in our red blood cells. This animal can live in low-oxygen water, but is very sensitive to environmental pollutants. If you look closely, you can see egg sacs. Even though we only have one Triops, this species is hermaphroditic and the eggs can be self-fertilized successfully. We are collecting the mud hoping to extract the eggs before the Triops eats them all.

The next section examines autoimmune disorders.

Check your knowledge. Can you:

provide examples of immune cancers, including lymphoma and leukemia?
describe the immunodeficiency disorders SCID and AIDS?
list the characteristics of a story that provides an engaging science experience?