Day 2 with a foldscope (and a workshop)

Nov 19, 2016 • 6:59 AM UTC

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amri_mani

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Its just my second day with the foldscope, and I’m off to teach a group of school teachers (brought together by the Tamilnadu Science Forum) how to assemble it. The session is led by S Krishnaswamy, and I am among half a dozen volunteers from IMSc , where the workshop is being held. There are several people who work with TNSF regularly, who have been a part of foldscope workshops before. We begin at ten, with a general introduction to the foldscope, a round of introductions, and a discussion about how it came about, how it has and can be used. The participants were also encouraged to blog about their activities in their own mother tongue.
By lunchtime, we had watched Manu’s TED talk on the foldscope and also finished assembling all the foldscopes. We had each volunteer (who had already built a foldscope before) guide the participants. The afternoon passed quickly making and viewing slides.
I am already a little better at taking pictures of what I see. When I got back home from the workshop, my eight-year-old son was waiting for me with a dead fly that he had caught earlier in the day. With him and three of his friends, we prepared slides of different parts of the fly, like the legs:

and the wings:

We had trouble with the compound eyes; we could not illuminate them properly. My son says “Its really fun and easy to catch insects”, so we’ll be looking at more of them.

Day 2 with a foldscope (and a workshop)

amri_mani

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