PB3A: Penguin Fun Facts

The scholarly, peer-reviewed, academic publication that I found was “Molecular evidence for the loss of three basic tastes in penguins” by Huabin Zhao, Jianwen Li, and Jianzhi Zhang. The authors are interested in looking at the relationship between specific penguin genes and the ability for penguins to taste. In their introduction, they state: “Vertebrates typically can detect five basic taste qualities: sweet, umami, bitter, sour and salty.” The interesting thing about this article is that by looking at the specific genes for each taste, researchers are able to tell which tastes penguins can perceive. The results indicated that penguins can perceive salty and sour tastes, but they lost their umami and bitter tastes in the common ancestor of all penguins, and their sweet taste was lost even earlier than that.

Because I chose an academic article about penguins, I thought it would be interesting to do a restaurant activity for kids. Many family restaurants have packets or sheets of paper for kids to doodle on while the adults talk, eat, and order food. They’re meant to keep the children entertained, and many of them are educational. They usually have lots of activities on them, such as coloring, connect the dots, and word searches along with the interesting facts about the topic. There are other conventions such as bright colors, cartoons, big font, animals or people, it can be educational, and it can have the kid’s menu on it. I was thinking about doing a restaurant activity about penguins, where there are activities to do on the side but also important information about the articles next to the activities.

For the older generation, I was thinking about doing a magazine cover. I thought it would be interesting to do a magazine cover because many adults read magazines in their spare time to get information. People usually order magazines from a catalog and have them come to their house or place of business every week or month, but many people read magazines when they are waiting. They could be waiting in line at a grocery store, waiting in the doctors or dentist’s office, or waiting at their hair salon. Because of this, magazine’s audiences have a wide range of people. The age ranges could be from teenager to grandparents. Magazines are often not read by children though, unless they are specific magazines for children such as Highlights for Children or Time for Kids. The magazine covers I’m thinking about are magazines for older people—people in their 20’s to people in their 80’s—magazines like Star, People, Time, Men’s Health, Forbes. Magazines usually have the title of the magazine in big bold words across the top with the same font in each issue, and a picture in the background to catch the reader’s attention. This cover image usually comes with a cover line that relates to the person or animal on the cover. There are also teasers and promotions on the cover to get the reader to look at specific articles inside the magazine. They also have barcodes for purchase, along with the price and the date (month and year) of release. I was thinking of doing a magazine cover with a penguin in the background and interesting taglines about penguin genes and the new discovery made in the scholarly article.

A question for the class and for Zack: do you think that I should do a magazine cover, or should I do a magazine article? A magazine article would have more text and could include more information from the scholarly article I read, but a magazine cover has its own interesting conventions that draw readers in. 

Here are some examples of the kids activity pages and of animal magazine covers that I plan on referencing: