The Inner Life of the Cell
Unless you are 9 feet tall with blue skin and a tail, you will be amazed by the computer animations found in ” The Inner Life of the Cell.” As the website explains, this award winning piece is from a series of animations XVIVO is creating for Harvard’s educational website BioVisions. The NYT piece with the full 411 is here.
In this NYT articles, there is an embedded video entitled ” The Animators of Life ” and at approximately 1:14 in the video you will see an animation of our favorite organism – Tetrahymena !
Warning: Don’t go to the site unless you have the time to watch everything at least 3 times.
While the 3-minute version with music is extraordinary, bio teachers might want to view the 8-minute narrated version at:
http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife.html
In my AP bio teaching days, I used the longer video with much stopping and translating of jargon. It took a full 40-minute period and, since we had already talked about many of the topics by the time we watched the video, the kids were able to understand a surprising amount. We watched the full version a couple of times, then the short musical version once for fun. I wanted the repeat of the full version, but students wanted a repeat of the musical version!
Haven’t looked yet to see if there’s an animated version of The Mitochondria, but I’ll bet there is.