Cell City: Cell Organelles Project

 

Updated December 28, 2022

In the Cell City project, students learn about cell parts by making connections between a bustling city and the activity within a cell. It was inspired by a fun Crash Course video titled "Eukaryopolis - The City of Animal Cells", a video I shared with my students before beginning the project. The Cell City project addresses Next Generation Science Standard MS-LS1-2: Develop and use a model to describe the function of a cell as a whole and ways parts of cells contribute to the function.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) encourage students to think about systems at different scales. I introduced the Cell City project by asking students to describe what a system is and to give examples. Students explained that a system was something with steps or parts that work together. We came up with examples that included human body systems, computer systems, and transportation systems. I asked whether a city was a system, and students decided it was because of the many different parts that interact. They also thought that cells were microscopic systems because of the different parts of a cell that all work together.

The first step of the project was to learn about what each cell part does. Students accessed a free, online text published by CK-12 for this. Next, students considered the job of each cell part and tried to find an analogous part in a city that serves a similar function. For example, the cell nucleus and city hall have a similar job because they both control what happens within the system. I gave students examples of city parts they could use, but students were also invited to use their own ideas.  

I created the city parts clipart using Google Draw. It was fairly time consuming but produced the results I wanted. Students cut out the images of city parts and glued them onto labels with the analogous cell parts. 

To make it easier for students to color the cell parts and labels the same color, I pasted the cell part clipart  (also created using Google Draw) into a table with the label for each part.

Students glued the cell parts onto their poster and pasted the cell part names onto the tops of the labels. 

To pull it all together, students wrote a paragraph comparing the functions of cell parts to various parts of a city and explained how these parts interact to form a single system. Some students completed an extension activity in which they wrote questions that could be answered by their posters. These questions were given out to their peers as a review activity once the posters were displayed on the wall.

To view the CrashCourse video that inspired this project, follow this link:

Eukaryopolis - The City of Animal Cells

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Thanks to Kavita and Parthiv for helping me edit this post!