All classes participating in this project have been asked to submit a final report to the project Discussion Area. In this report, students share what they have learned from doing the project. Click on one of the following schools below and see what they said:

Nido de Aguilas International School Santiago, Chile
Singapore American School Singapore, Singapore
Cal Tex American School Rumbai, Riau, Indonesia
Coastal Academy Oceanside, California, USA
Thomas Jefferson Middle School Teaneck, New Jersey, USA
Poplar Bluff School Poplar Bluff, Missouri, USA

Nido de Aguilas International School Santiago, Chile

Fellow students around the world,
We are the students of the International School of Nido de Aguilas in grade eight science. Our school, "NIDO" for short, is located in Santiago, Chile. Santiago is the country's capital. Our campus is located in Santiago de Chile, Located exactly at -33º Latitude, -72º Longitude. In Chile, the native language is Spanish, but in Nido the atmospheric talk is "Spanglish". Cachai? (Get it?) is one of the common Chilean phrases. Our school is pretty awesome. We have a high-tech computer lab, a gorgeous campus and teachers from just about everywhere in the world; all surrounding a diverse community. The country has many great features too. Phenomenal skiing and snowboarding thanks to the great Andes Mountains, beautiful lakes and rivers, and cold but nice beaches. Easter Island is part of Chile as well, it is a great place to visit. Something very surprising about the country is its contrasting geography. Maybe many people think Chile is a boring place to live, but really it is really fun because you can travel to the South and find great lakes, snow, glaciers and the Patagonia. You can find places like the volcanoes of Villarica and Llaima. Also, to the North, we have the driest desert of the world! While to the East we have the great mountain range of the Andes. Finally to the West we have the great Pacific Ocean. Chile is a great living place and the school is incredible. Chileans love playing sports like soccer, here called futbol (pronounced football), and tennis. Chile is a great country full of different people that make an unique society. Our science teacher is really fun and also does really entertaining activities for us to have fun while working, such as this genetics survey. With this project we would like to find out which traits are more common in society, dominant or recessive. We are very enthusiastic about this project and would like to share it with everyone!

Sincerely,
Block D Nido de Aguilas

The purpose of this project was to find out if dominant traits are more commonly seen in the population that recessive traits. The hypothesis was that the dominant traits would be more commonly seen than recessive ones. The hypothesis made was incorrect. Dominant traits are not always more common. While forelocks, for instance, are a dominant traits that is not commonly seen within Santiago, Chile. Dimples are also a dominant trait; however, most people surveyed did not have dimples. The same is shown for mid-digit hair. ON the other hand, there are some dominant traits that are more common than recessive ones. Color vision is a dominant trait and there are very few who are color blind.
Humans are very complex and this can explain our sometimes surprising results. In some cases, one gene determines many characteristics. A recessive trait might also become more common because of female preference, which is one of the driving forces of evolution.
In this survey, there probably was no experimental error. One thing that could have made it more accurate would have been a more even ratio of male to female, a larger sample size, as well as more diverse test subjects.
During this project, many subjects were of expanded knowledge. Mainly of course, it was seen that dominant traits aren't more frequent than recessive traits, and it was clearly expressed. We also learned how genes differ from one person to the next, and gave an extremely important basis to the knowledge about how genes are passed on.
-Written by Camila U. and Agustina Z.

Singapore American School Singapore, Singapore

We live in Singapore.

Onto us, rain does pour.

We are all very cool,

But not too cool,

For Singapore American School.

We are in grade eight,

And might have a wonderful fate.

We have a cool principal,

His real name is Cal.

Singapore is very small,

On it there is many a mall.

Living here makes me glad,

For there is diversity to be had.

Mrs. Pratt likes to teach us,

And she hasn’t yet impeached us.

Our class is awesome,

Awesome, just like a possum.

We hypothesis that the dominant trait is not the prevalant trait.

Hello the rest of the world! We are located on a teensy, tiny little dot on the map…. SINGAPORE! Where’s Singapore? We’re in South East Asia, learning at Singapore American School, a multicultural society. Some things unique to Singapore include its hot and humid climates, their strict laws, a safe and clean environment, the 40 minute drive across the island, our merlion statues, and our slang, lah! Nationalities in Mrs. Pratt’s 8th Grade Science block C class include Americans, Singaporeans, Koreans, Canadians, Chinese, Indians, Cambodians, Swedish, Dutch, and Germans. We’re a fun and humorous class that enjoys athletics and the arts. When we’re not in classes, we’re playing basketball, soccer, softball, volleyball, baseball, football, rugby, and badminton. Some students also enjoy playing instruments, singing, dancing, acting, and showing off our artistic abilities.

We hypothesize that the dominant trait is NOT the prevalant trait!

We are the students of Ms Pratt’s 8th Grade G block science class. We are like a vegetable garden; we have many different sorts of vegetables. We have vegetables from all over the world….I know what you’re thinking, apples can’t grow in Singapore. But let’s just think of that metaphorically. Us vegetables are very gregarious and outspoken. We like to discuss about how the nature of our being. (that’s science) (btw, it’s Halloween so we sound weird. You should see our picture we submitted) Anyway, our garden (school) is a very happy and jolly place to be. We sit on chairs with desks…not in teepees…we’re actually modern. We like to watch Brainpop, don’t you think Tim and Moby are so hot??? We should study their genes and find out what's recessive or dominant. Because we grow in Singapore, we rot very quickly because the weather is very hot and humid and tropical-like. If we break the rules, we have to put our name in the naughty vegetable list (do you have a naughty list?? J ) As you can tell, we are very “special” in our own way. (btw the tomato helped write this - see the picture) Us being vegetables, we look up to our idol….the MERLION. (it’s a lion with a fishtail) (it’s weird... we know) We’re kind of running out of vegetable-like things to say now, so the last thing we’ll say is, “EAT YOUR VEGGIES, OR WE’LL EAT YOU!!! J

BTW - Our hypothesize is the the dominant trait is NOT the prevalant trait.

The place that we call home is the one of the most tropical places in the world - Singapore. One aspect of our country that is most uncommon is that it’s snowless. You walk outside and you feel the sun’s rays beating down on you and in seconds, you feel beads of sweats running down your face and neck. Our school, the leading international school in the world is both creative and culturally educational. Especially the 8th grade science H Block class of Mrs. Pratt! This class is obnoxious, but fun, loud, but friendly, but most of all, intelligent. Our home, Singapore is probably the best place on earth

Cal Tex American School, Rumbai, Riau, Indonesia

Hello Fellow Students,

Our school is one of two American schools in Riau, Indonesia. The school is owned by Chevron Oil Company. Our school is made up of 45 students (Preschool through 8th grade).The school can be found in Pekanbaru, Sumatra, Indonesia. The latitude and longitude of our school is N 0 degrees-35' and 101.45 degrees east. We live in a camp in which locals and expats (people living and working overseas whose nationality is different from the host country) live.

The camp is like a little city to us. We all have our own little streets. Here in the camp of Rumbai is like paradise. We have a pool , golf course, a store, tennis courts, bowling alley, basketball court, squash courts, and some nature preserves. There are about 500 people that live in the Rumbai camp. We basically live in a rain forest full of snakes, wild pigs, squirrels, horn bills, and four types of monkeys.

The question that we will be answering is: Is there a relationship between the frequency of a trait in a population and whether the trait is dominant? Our hypothesis for this question is: the dominant trait will be the more frequent trait exhibited in a human phenotype.

From,
The eighth graders of CAS

At the start of the program our hypothesis was: the dominant trait will be the most frequent trait exhibited. Now that we have collected our data and seen the data from other schools, we have found our hypothesis to be false. We reached this conclusion by finding the percentage frequency of each trait. In almost every trait except for the thumb and pinky we found that the recessive trait was more common. We believe that every trait in the list except for color blindness is benign (in other words not critical to our life). Maybe this is why recessive traits appear.

We believed that the dominant trait would be the trait that everybody gets. In order for the dominant trait to appear, we would need only one allele in each persons' genotype.

We learned that even though the dominant trait is dominant, that does not mean that it will occur most often. We wonder why the recessive trait appears more often. Does anyone have any other answers?

Coastal Academy Oceanside, Cailfornia, USA

Hello from San Diego! We are a Charter School/Exemplary Independent Study Program 2 minutes from the Pacific Ocean (beach). Our latitude/longitude is 117 deg 15' W, 32 deg, 55' N. The weather is usually very nice, about 70 - 75 degrees year round. Favorite pastimes are of course surfing, boogie boarding, skateboarding, soccer, swimming, scootering, biking, hiking (We are a mile from Torrey Pines State Reserve overlooking the beach and home of the rare Torrey Pine tree.) Our favorite foods match our active lifestyles, food on the go, like burritos, wraps, smoothies. We like pasta too and basically foods from all nations, but being only 30-40 minutes away from Mexico, we eat Mexican food more than we eat hamburgers!

We hope to learn about other cultures across America and around the world. Of course we also want to learn about your genotypes and phenotypes!!!

Our theory is that some dominant traits appear more often in society but in other cases recessive traits will appear more. We think this might be the case, because in Southern Ca at least, there are just as many if not more people with blue eyes (recessive) as brown. Maybe natural selection picks recessive genes in some cases. We think it will vary from place to place.

We learned about dominant and recessive genes.We realized that it's important that there are two alleles in humans, one from the mother and one from the father. It allows there to be more variety and better survival.It makes us want to learn more about reproduction that does not involve parents like bacteria.

Our hypothesis was right that sometimes the dominant trait occurs more and sometimes the recessive trait does. We guessed that a dominant trait might not show up more if for some reason the person who has it can't reproduce. There's no reason why dimples would make a person not be able to reproduce that we know of, so maybe there are just less of us with the dimple gene. We don't think dimples are connected to a disease. We tried to think of some other reasons like maybe an egg with the white forelock gene might not survive as often, but we have no reason to really think that. Genetics is very complicated. It would have to be, because if you think about it, most of the time people are healthy. We read that RNA might have genes from great great grandparents, that are stronger genes from when survival was harder and that in an emergency these genes get woken up. We only read that once and don't know if it's true. It wouldn't surprise us. Some of it like the Punnet Square is pretty easy and some of it is pretty weird, in a good way. Like everybody else we have more questions then when we started.

Thomas Jefferson Middle School Teaneck, New Jersey, USA

We are sixth grade students from Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Teaneck, New Jersey. Our school has about seven hundred students from fifth to eigth grade. We do not wear uniforms, but we do have a dress code. We are English speaking, but we do speak other languages such as Spanish at home. Our after school activities include soccer, football, softball, hockey, Double Dutch, track and field, chess, and bridge.
Teaneck is a suburban town with a population of 39,000 people. We are five miles from New York City, and many of our parents work there. Teaneck is a very special town because of our racial and religious diversity. We are proud of Teaneck, because it was the first town in the United States to voluntarily integrage its schools in 1964. Our town has churches, synagogues, and a mosque. We have an excellent hospital called Holy Name Hospital, and a university named Fairleigh Dickenson in our town. Teaneck is six square miles, and has fourteen parks. We have a downtown with delicious ethnic restaurants, a movie theater, and lots of stores. We enjoy four seasons so our town looks particularly pretty now as the trees turn colors. Teaneck is a wonderful and safe place to live.

Polar Bluff School Poplar Bluff, Missouri, USA

Hi ya’ll,

We are 6th graders from Poplar Bluff, Missouri- USA. Our absolute location is 36.756 North & 90.392 West. Our school is the Poplar Bluff 5th & 6th Grade Center which opened in 1997. We are home of the little mules. Our school colors are maroon and white. Our school has approximately 750 students. This is the only public school for 5th and 6th graders in our town. Our school has four hallways, two for each grade level. We attend school from 7:30 AM to 2:30 PM five days a week. We are divided into pods with four teachers per group. Teachers teach the core subjects to all students in the pod and homeroom teachers also teach reading. Ms. Carda teaches science in our pod. Our classes have about 22 to 23 students in them usually equally balanced with the same number of boys and girls. Ms. Schalk teaches math, Mrs. Stevenson social studies, and Ms. Davis communication arts. We attend special classes like PE, art, music, library, and computers one day a week. We get a 30 minute lunch period and 30 minutes for lunch. We also have a study hall period to work on homework. Our school has a few clubs such as Boys and Girls club, Just say no to drugs club, Girl Scouts, and Boy Scouts.

Poplar Bluff is the town that Tyler Hansbrough is from. He is currently a member of the University of North Carolina basketball team. The population of Poplar Bluff city limits is approximately 18,000, but there are about 30,000 that reside in our county. Our town offers a lot of sports like basketball, football, golf, tennis, wrestling, baseball, skating, karate, bowling, gymnastics, soccer, volleyball, hunting, cheerleading, swimming, and softball. We live in a rural area. The main jobs in our town are related to the medical field, schools, farming, and factory jobs. There are many churches in our towns. Farmers have crops like cotton, soy beans, corn, wheat, and rice. Many farmers raise cattle. Our town has a Jr. College called Three Rivers Community College.

We are excited about this study. Most of the students in our class hypothesize that we will see both dominant and recessive traits about equal. Several students believe that the dominant traits will be the most prevalent.

Sincerely,
Ms. Carda’s homeroom 4th hr. science class

See their final report via powerpoint presentation! One and Two