The Centre of the Cell at Queen Mary University in London was my classroom for the day. This was one of the most interesting projects I have done.
The first photo is of me outside our classroom. It is really well hidden inside this massive steel cell.
The centre of a real cell is called a nucleus, which is what they have called their cafe at the university.

The lady told us about red blood and white blood cells, DNA, platelets (they help heal cuts and your body) and Charles Darwin.
We learned about a strand of DNA being as long as a skipping rope and that it fits inside your body because it is so small. All the DNA in our bodies can stretch to Pluto and back which is 10bn miles.
DNA looks like a very thin twisted ladder made up of pairs from four different chemicals. DNA lives inside of the nucleus which is the very centre of a cell. There are 37 trillion cells in everybody’s body.

The Sock DNA Challenge was very funny. Two teams had to race to match socks on a washing line and this is because DNA always comes in pairs.
If we matched the socks then it would be like DNA. Me and my friend won!

Did you know we share 50% of the same DNA with bananas and we are both radioactive too? It’s true.
Genes send messages and give instructions to your body to make you grow and change. Hormones send slower messages to change to your body.
Charles Darwin discovered that animals and people adapt to their climate and where they live. Because we don’t have to hunt and we live in communities and have hospitals, we don’t need to change as much as we used to. This means we are not evolving fast now.
We played a game to spot animals that had been camouflaged by the background which means that they had adapted. It might even take a few thousand years to change. I think they changed to be safe from predators that might want to eat them.

The STEM POD

We went into the STEM POD in the afternoon and saw the nucleus and that was amazing. Nobody expected it to open up. It was full of crazy games like Poo Racer about digestion and mum managed to set fire to a baby we were supposed to be helping in another game. That was really funny.

We were asked to find an exhibit which was false. I found it. It was the teeth. Mum thought it might be the knee or the intestine. This picture is of a pair of lungs.

Rowan said: “This was brilliant fun, especially the view of the labs where you could see where the scientists worked and I didn’t expect our classroom to be in the massive cell, that really was unexpected.”

Photos: Taken by mum this time as I was really busy.