Module 8: Biological Oceanography

teen reading a magazineAuthentic Assessment IconMarine Organism
Magazine Cover

Pretend that you are the creative director for a science magazine that features information about marine organisms. In this role, you are responsible for creating the magazine cover concepts and graphic design layout of each issue. You report directly to the magazine's chief editor.

To successfully design your magazine cover, you will need to:

  1. Think about and pick topics that would represent the information about biological oceanography that you learned in this module. You might include topics about some of the following:
    • The seven characteristics of living things
    • The origin of life in the oceans
    • Phylogenetic classification
    • The five Kingdoms of organism classification
    • Marine organism classification based on the water column
    • Important marine organism adaptations
  2. Since this is a magazine cover, you must include pictures and original headlines that would grab the attention of your audience and make them want to buy your issue off of the newsstand. At a minimum, you must include:
    • A masthead (the magazine title)
    • A dateline (the date of the issue)
    • A selling line (the magazine's motto - i.e. a news magazine might state on the cover "Your world at a glance")
    • A main image (the largest image on your cover representing the biggest article)
    • Two cover lines with images (highlights of other magazine articles that would be appealing to your readers)
  3. Create your magazine cover from the resources that you have gathered. Remember, your magazine cover is a summary of the contents inside the magazine. You might want to look at the cover of real-life magazines to help you visualize and organize your marine organism magazine cover.

Options to create your magazine cover include the following:

  • Hand-draw the assignment and then take a picture of it for submission to the assignment’s dropbox.
  • Hand-draw the assignment and then scan it for submission to the assignment’s dropbox.
  • Utilize a paint, publishing, word processing, presentation, or graphics software program to create the assignment.

Before you begin, access the Marine Life Magazine Cover Directions and Checklist to make sure that you have included all of the items required for full credit. You may need to use resources outside of this course to complete this assignment. If so, please submit a Works Cited document. If you need assistance, visit the Developmental Module for information on citing any resources that you used.

Assignment Icon
Once you have completed your magazine cover, please submit your work to the dropbox.

Test Icon
Once you have completed this module, please complete the module test.