Unravelling The World Of Foldscopes: The Lodha Genius Program

Name: Toshani Sharma
Grade: 10
Venue: Lecture Room 005, AC04, Ashoka University

Foldscopes? What are they? The same question was jumping around in my head when I first heard about them but my keen and curious brain knew that it was something I needed to try out. 

My first workshop of the Lodha Genius Program had been the Foldscope Workshop which was as inquisitive and intriguing as it sounds. We were given small paper made innovations which worked as microscopes! That’s right, foldscopes are paper based, portable microscopes that help students to gain hands-on experience while observing their nature at cellular level and satisfying their hunger for knowledge.

This workshop was facilitated by Dr. Anupama Harshal, who was one of the prior reasons we started enjoying the use of foldscopes. With the funny chicken dance at the beginning to restore our energy till the actual observations under the foldscope, we did it all. Let me tell you about each day of our workshop because it is certainly worth reading about. So, stay tuned!

Day 1:
Date: 20 May, 2024
Day: Monday

On a fine Monday it all started. When we students were contemplating amongst our mixed emotions of our excitement and nervousness, the professors and the TAs were waiting to increase that excitement and vanish the nervousness within us. 

The lecture started out with a very funny and comical chicken dance that all the students, TAs and even the professor had to perform. It was not only a mode of entertainment but it also helped us students break the ice and be comfortable with the professor and TAs.

Now it was time to get a bit serious and learn about foldscopes! As mentioned above, foldscopes are portable microscopes which were developed in the lab of Dr. Manu Prakash, a professor from Stanford University.They are really efficient and provide hands on experience to students to observe different spicemen on a cellular level.

Each student was provided with Foldscope 2.0, which consists of the following:

• Foldscope
• 3 magnification lenses (50x, 140x, 340x)
• 3 glass slides
• 3 paper slides
• Light module
• Coupler
• Ring stickers
• Pipette
• Tweezers
• Cotton swab
• Sample tube

We were also introduced to the functioning of the foldscopes. The steps to work with a foldscope are as follows:

1. Prepare a slide (Paper or glass)
2. Place the slide at the desired location (The specimen shall be focused towards the centre)
3. Place a 50x lens in the lens holder while keeping the specimen in centre 
4. Place a torch to ensure adequate light to observe the specimen
5. Observe and conclude your observations
6. Continue the same steps for 140x and 340x as well

Voila! Now we knew how to work with a foldscope but the urge of trying it out was making us restless. Luckily, just as the professor had predicted our excitement, she had planned to make us work on onion cells on the very first day. We were advised to work in pairs and adhere to the following steps to get the best results.

Process:
Take the sample
Attach tape on one side of the paper slide 
Without hampering with the sample, try to peel out the epidermis of the onion using the tweezers
Place a small piece of epidermis on the tape 
Cover the sample by another layer of tape or a coverslip
Place the slide in the foldscope
Attach the torch to the foldscope
Attach a 50x lens
Observe and conclude from your observations
Continue the same steps for 140x and 340x
 Draw your observations from different lenses and conclude 

We spent the rest of the class while performing this particular task. It was not so easy as it sounds and we definitely had some obstacles and challenges while performing this task.

Our Observations:

1. Fern rhizome

1. Onion Peel

Challenges:

• Formation of air bubbles while placing the coverslip
• The sample kept getting damaged due to rather our fingerprints or tweezers

However, we really enjoyed the session and had the best of our time. At the end, we concluded by a fun activity when we all had to write down our current emotion that we were feeling. This session also indulged excitement to come back the next day with higher levels of curiosity.





Day 2:
Date: 21 May, 2024
Day: Tuesday

The second day of the foldscopes workshop revealed the little detectives within us. We had been given an important case to solve.
The Case:
A family had gone outside and only the housekeeper was at home .When the family came back, they found the housekeeper dead. The valuable and precious jewels and possessions were stolen. Most importantly, the window glass was broken and there were blood stains on the window and the floor. Examine the samples of hair, fibre, nail dust, squamous cells from cheek and fingerprint.

We started working at each sample in pairs, and we had to be quick since we had to make many samples in just one workshop!
We were now allowed to explore the samples on the glass slides as well. 

Process:

1. Take the sample
2. Take the glass slide 
3. Place a small piece of the sample on the slide 
4. Cover the sample by a layer of tape or a coverslip
5. Place the slide in the foldscope
6. Attach the torch to the foldscope
7. Attach a 50x lens
8. Observe and conclude from your observations
9. Continue the same steps for 140x and 340x
10.  Draw your observations from different lenses and conclude 

Our observations:

1. Cheek Swab

1. Nail Dust

1. Fibre

1. Hair Sample

1. Fingerprint

Challenges:

• Formation of air bubbles while placing the coverslip
• The sample kept getting damaged due to rather our fingerprints or tweezers

Day 3 & 4:
Date: 22 May, 2024 and 23 May, 2024
Day: Wednesday and Thursday

The next two days, when we had worn off the spirit of little detectives, it was time to appreciate mother nature. That’s right, we got to observe things like:

1. Pond Water
2. Pollen
3. Fungus
4. Tomato

We followed the same procedure for the above samples and had fun while observing the things we commonly find around us.


Observations:

1. Pond Water

1. Pollen

1. Fungus

4.  Tomato

Day 5:
Date: 24 May, 2024
Day:  Friday

It was the day of presentations! The day when we finally got to share what we had learnt over the past few days. There were 6 groups, led by individual TAs and we all had the chance to express ourselves.

Conclusion

Overall, the foldscopes workshop was a delight. It fed our curiosity and made us more keen about the working of anything around us at cellular level. We developed our thinking from not knowing what a foldscope was to being very skilled about observing under them and finding them as the most important and intriguing tool. To sum it up, the foldscopes workshop was certainly memorable and it will be hard to forget such an inquisitive week.