A small step – Foldscopes reach teachers

Jun 21, 2018 • 3:26 AM UTC

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Microorganisms

TCIS Outreach

We are a group of students, volunteers and staff working with TIFR Hyderabad's Science Education and Outreach program: http://www.tifrh.res.in/~outreach/

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The lesson for June may be patience. As hundreds of newly recruited teachers get counselled, assigned schools and trained; and hundreds more working teachers anticipate their transfer orders to new schools, bright and creative minds mill around, waiting.
This week, just days after they joined school, we held a workshop to introduce foldscopes to teachers from eight schools and one college of life sciences of TSWREIS . With other trainings coming up for the teachers it will be another two weeks before foldscopes reach the students. And so we wait too.
In the meanwhile we had good fun at the workshop . The teachers amazed us by finding daphnia and a few dividing amoebae in some slightly turbid pond water that we had almost given up on. And we admired the thin sectioning techniques that some of them showed with plant stems and leaves.
The workshop began with a session on what research in science is about and what all is done at TIFR Hyderabad . At the end of the foldscope training the teachers visited a genetics lab to see how the fruit fly serves as model organism and how fluorescence tagging is used to visualise patterns of gene expression.
Some scenes from the workshop:

Workshop for teachers of TSWREIS, June 19-20, 2018 Some images taken by the teachers:

Clockwise from top left: 1. Stem of Portulaca oleracea, 2. Algae in pond water, 3. Matchstick cells, 4. Stomata on leaf of Portulaca oleracea, 5. Outer epidermis of onion, 6. Amoeba dividing in pond water Next month we hope to see foldscopes being used with students in their regular classes and possibly beyond. These are the spaces to watch:
TSWREIS Chilkur
TSWREIS Dharmaram B
TSWREIS Gowlidoddi
TSWREIS Isnapur (joined on August 11, 2018)
TSWREIS Kondapur
TSWREIS Mahendra Hills
TSWREIS Mulugu
TSWREIS Narsingi
TSWREIS Shaikpet
TSWRDC Life Sciences College (Mahendra Hills, at Shamirpet)
Workshop credits: Bhavya , Hardi and Udit
Jayashree Ramadas