Reflection on Virtual Microbe 4 (Group 16)

Hello ! My name is Nurul Afifah binti Ab Rahman, a second year student doing a bachelor's degree in Food and Science Technology in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Shah Alam. I'm taking the course Food Microbiology in my third semester, and for our biggest project which contributes 10% of our total marks we were assigned to do a virtual microbe where we have to work together with students from other universities (UKM, UMT, UPM, USM and UM) who are taking the same course as we are. This project includes three video calls with our teammates from other universities, mind map, flipbook, poster and thinglink.

Frankly speaking, I wasn't too thrilled when they first briefed us regarding this project. I thought it was an unnecessary burden to all of us students, who got the time and a strong internet connection to do all of that in such short period ? Why can't they let us do slides, presentation or sampling like other normal assignments ? But boy was I wrong. This project is one of the highlights in my third semester of degree. It's different and unique from all of the other assignments I had done. Firstly, I got the chance to know and interact with students from other universities. There are eight of us in Group 16 ( 3 from UiTM, 3 from UMT and 2 from UKM). Our first virtual meetup was through a video call using Zoom. That night we discussed what food borne pathogen we're going to adopt and how to do our very first assignment, the mind map. We had chosen Shigella sp. because we simply just liked the name Shi-gel-la. 

Doing the mind mapping had made us learned a lot about Shigella, it's classification, definitions and symptoms, pathogenesis, diagnosis and testing, antibiotic resistance, transmission, people at risk, prevention and treatment and so many more. It honestly amazed me how one species of microbe that can't even be seen with our naked eyes can bring such a big impact on humankind. We chose the tool Popplet for our mind map. For the second progress report, we had to do a second discussion through video call and a digital flipbook. We had chosen Cliptomize in doing the digital flipbook. In this part of our project, we just had to elaborate all the informations we had gained from doing the mind map. I had so much joy in doing the flipbook, it was like making a journal but in virtual form, there are so many fonts, templates, and background designs that we can choose from. The chance for us to express our creativity was limitless. It even virtually flips when we click for the next page. For our third progress report, we have to submit our final video discussion, a poster and Thinglink. The poster on Shigella is still in progress and the tool being used is canva.com. This has really tested us on our graphic design skills. We have yet to do the final progress report, Thinglink since we have to submit this reflection report beforehand. 

What I can say about this virtual microbe project is that it is an unexpected delight for me that I can honestly say that I am honoured and relieved that my classmates and I got to be the first batch in our course to be given such a unique project and tasks. Working this project together with my teammates from other universities is a remarkable experience that I will not easily forget and I can only wish to be given the same experience for other projects in near future. My teammates from UTM are such a beautiful lot with great ideas in minds and I have high respect and gratitude to the funny duo from UPM that even though this isn't their project to do they still took their times and energy to guide us in doing the progress reports. Everyone did their parts equally that each of us only had to do so little to give a huge output.

I was also exposed to the many tools on the internet that I had never heard of before but was surprised at how convenient and fun they were when being used for my tasks. There are so many more tools other than the ones we had used like Padlet, Prezi, Powtoon that I look forward to use them in my next work. What a time to be alive when you have these kind of advanced technologies ! It is now that I understand why they called it 'adopt a microbe' because now every time I heard about Shigella in class or come across it on the internet I would beamed in pride and recognition for it is now the one microbe I have most knowledge about. Now I know more than to not taking a great care in my hygiene and food for a microbe as impossibly little as Shigella can bring out the worst of consequences.