Kid Science: Understanding DNA and RNA with Candy

One of the coolest things about my job is working with so many smart and innovative people.  And those people all have a passion for science they want to share.   Just recently a co-worker shared a cool way to teach kids about DNA and RNA.   And the kids get to eat the project at the end. :)

DNA is the building block of life and it is some pretty amazing stuff.

Here are some amazing facts (http://www.sciencecentres.org.uk/projects/handsondna/4.8%20-%20Amazing%20facts%20and%20quiz%20questions.pdf):

• Each cell contains roughly 2 meters of DNA.
• Humans have roughly 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion cells).
 • If you unraveled all of your DNA from all of your cells and laid out the DNA end to end, the strand would stretch from the Earth to the Sun hundreds of times (the sun is approximately 98 million miles away from Earth).
 • You could fit 25,000 strands of DNA side by side in the width of a single adult hair.
 • The DNA is tightly coiled up and structured into 46 chromosomes.
•  Our chromosomes are arranged in pairs. We inherit one copy of the pair from our Mum and one       from our Dad.
• There are approximately 3 billion (3,000,000,000) chemical letters (otherwise known as bases) in the DNA code in every cell in your body.
 • This is a massive amount of information. It would fill 200 yellow pages in small type font.
 • If you tried typing the whole genetic code out (typing at 200 letters per minute) it would take 29 years (without taking any breaks!).


The pictures below were put together by a colleague and it is very easy way to have fun with your kids visualizing what DNA and RNA look like.   Have fun!