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Last month me and Mitali had the privilege to volunteer for a Foldscope booth at the Eklavya ScienceCon in Pune. It is a one of its kind science conference organised by Moving Academy of Medicine and Biomedicine, Pune along with Tribal Research and Training Institute, Pune for children studying in Eklavya schools. These schools provide tribal children with free education in English.

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Around 400 children from Eklavya Schools participated in this conference where they had several activities. Some lectures on astrophysics, artificial intelligence, astronomy and more along with opportunities to personally interact with scientists like Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, Dr. Madhav Deo, Dr. Rita Mulherkar and many more. I was personally pleasantly surprised to hear the brilliant questions these students asked! That too about astronomy and artificial intelligence!

Padma Shri Dr. Madhav is the founder of TRTI and Dr. Rita is one of the main scientists associated with TRTI and MAMB.

Thanks to Dr. Rita and Lakshmi Sir (Laks) , we had the opportunity to set up a Foldscope booth at the conference to demonstrate the use of Foldscope to the students.

On day 1 and 2 since the children had a tight schedule we had very few students coming at the booth. We were quite sad about that.

But on the third day 😀

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We had maaany children all bubbling with curiosity and eager to learn what Foldscope is.

One of them ran away all of a sudden leaving us puzzled! and he returned back with his grandmother because he wanted her to see the foldscope 😀

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Since we had very few kits we could only demonstrate some samples but the kids being so enthusiastic wanted to fold one by themselves. Each one of them performed one step and together they assembled a foldscope after which they saw samples through it. The joy on their faces after assembling their own microscopes was priceless!!!!

All of us went out to collect samples of insects and ants.

We demonstrated projection mode and just then one of the students asked, “Didi, what do blood cells look like?”

Excited we asked him, well do you want to see? And we rushed to get a lancet from the neighboring booth. 😀

It was an amazing experience! All the children from the schools left us awestruck with their brilliance every day.
The only thing that disheartened us was that we had several teachers coming us and asking for foldscopes. They requested us to let them have atleast one foldscope because most of these schools don’t have a single microscope.

As MAMB states – “Creative minds, who are game-changers, are evenly
distributed in all societies irrespective of caste, creed, race, geographic location, and socio-economic status.”

And we truly believe that access to scientific tools should also be unbiased and evenly distributed among these young minds.

Their thirst to know more and learn more touched our heart and we want to do whatever we can to help them get access to foldscope.

We are sharing contacts of a few teachers to figure out if any of our DBT funded super users could help them out in some way. All these are contacts of primary and secondary school teachers who expressed their immense desire to have access to foldscopes in thier schools.

Asarbari Ashramschool, Taluka- Peth
Mr. V A Patil sir
9423071850
vijaypatil93839@gmail.com

Narashi Ashramschool, Taluka- Dindori
Mr. P R Jadhav
9850517757
prashant.jadhav757@gmail.com

Thanapada Ashramschool, Taluka- Trimbakeshwar
Mr. A S Chaure
9422838641
ashokchaure2012@gmail.com

EMRS Shendegaon , Shahapur
Mr. Jitendra Sapale
7770098759
sapalejitu1993@gmail.com

Government Secondary Ashramschool, Taluka- Ambegaon
Laxman Sonaji Deokar
9420005953
laxmandeokar028@gmail.com

Some more of the few things that left the children awestruck were motile bacteria, protozoa, plant cells, ants, insects, and more.

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Protozoans Stream of bacteria

All these samples were collected by students themselves and therefore the joy they had on seeing their own collected samples was truly what made this foldscope outreach a success! We hope to meet all of them again in the future when they become big big big scientists! 😀
(We also got autographs from some of these future scientists)

Mitali and Ronak
Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous College, Mumbai.