Chain Factory

The activity we performed as a class initially came off as confusing to me. In the beginning each member of the class was handed a card with a number on it and a sheet that had the corresponding role on the paper. After a short explanation and direction we were set off in the room to do a trial run(I wasn't quite sure what to expect or what I was doing). As each member of the class got used to their "job" the process began to  move faster and faster. By the end of all the chaos in the room we were allowed time to sit down and reflect on what we had just done.
Some observations that I made within the room as this was going on was the person in the room with the role of the "generator" and the person called the "keeper of the plans" were not doing any busy work throughout all the chaos and a few other other people were just standing around watching most of the time as well while the messengers and the assemblers and many others were scrambling around the room. So in other words, they roles each person had differed greatly. While i discussed with my group what we just did we found out that we were acting out the components of a cell and each person in the class was a different representation of a part of the cell. For example, the office was the nucleus and chain we were creating was protein made up of amino acids which was represented by the cubes. In my case I was a assembler which was a ribosome given direction by my messenger which represented a messenger RNA.
I thought that this way of learning such a complex system in this type of way was incredibly helpful. I have attempted to learn this system manny times before and have never made it more than a memorization for my upcoming exam. After this I can honestly feel like I understand it. I think that I feel  much more confident in this because I was able to be in the process myself and have to catch on to what they others were doing around me an then relate it to the actual functions of a cell.