When students are studying the human body for the Great River lesson, a standard follow-up or extension is research on different diseases. I reserve this for our older students since disease research requires familiarity with the body systems, the organs within the systems, and different types of tissues. Traditionally, I have taught the study of systems to the fourth graders, organs and tissues to the fifth graders, and diseases to the sixth graders. One disease in particular that almost everyone has had some experience with is cancer. Make sure to consider the intense feelings that some of your students may have on the subject.

Cancer begins with a cell in the human body that has undergone several mutations. As a result, the cancer cell grows and multiplies uncontrolled, becoming nonresponsive to its surrounding cells. This can become a severe problem as it becomes larger and larger, transforming into a tumor that literally squishes the healthy cells around it while stealing their nutrients. Even worse, this uncontrollable cluster of cancer cells can break off pieces or metastasize and travel through the blood to other body parts. They create new clusters of cancer cells and wreak havoc across the body.

This uncontrollable aspect of cancer also makes it interesting from a research perspective. Cancer will live and grow as long as it has food. Cancer is immortal; it has silenced the genes that would have caused the cell to die naturally. There are cancer cells in research right now that are 70 years old and have far outlived the person, Henrietta Lacks, that they were taken. (Note that there is some controversy about collecting these cells for research.) Because cancer will not die on its own, making it very hard to kill. However, therapies like surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, cutting off the food supply with medications, and futuristic gene therapies can help treat cancer once it is found.

Another reason cancer is so infamous is it’s hard to detect by the human body. Unlike foreign organisms, the cancer cell(s) was once part of the host organism. This can make it hard to be “discovered” by the immune system and destroyed before it becomes a bigger problem. The body catches most of these cancer cells before they become a full-blown disease, but not all of them. Cancer is not contagious or given from one person to another. Cancers are rogue cells that are not serving the overall good of the human body anymore. They are stealing nutrients only for themselves to fuel their unregulated growth.

This game demonstrates how the immune system hunts for cancer using the premise of a popular computer game called Among Us. Students will play a game that shows how cancer proliferates, how it can be caught by the immune system early on, and what happens when it is not.

Materials: 

·      A large play area (a gym works best, but can be played outside)

·      Many different scoring mechanisms and materials can be used, limited only by your imagination or the physical skill you want to develop.

o   For this lesson plan’s sake, I will use multiple portable goals and soccer balls. However, this game could quickly be done with hockey sticks, tennis balls, or basketballs and multiple basketball hoops. This game could even use large containers, dodgeballs, or tennis balls if resources are limited.

·      A scoreboard or whiteboard that is big enough to display the score of the cancer player(s)

Minimum Number of Students Needed: While this game could be played with as few as five students, having more students makes this game much more fun and challenging. The more students, the harder the immune system player has to look to figure out who the cancer cell(s) are.

Age: Upper elementary and middle school