Rock Snot and Foldscopes!
Jun 04, 2015 • 5:50 AM UTC
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My middle school students have been active young scientists this year both in the field and in the lab. I want to share two funny things that happened this winter that both lead back to microscopes… Not just any microscopes — Foldscopes .
The first funny thing happened on a visit to the Jackson Lab. My 7th graders and I were being wowed by the amazing microscopes that they have buried in their basement. The microscope guru walked us through the capabilities of each one and we marveled at how advanced the technology was and how little our classroom models seemed to be able to do. On our way out he said he had saved the most exciting microscope, the one on the cutting edge, the one that was still in the testing phase. I was intrigued. I was especially intrigued when I saw him pull a flat piece of cardboard out of his pocket. Behold – the Foldscope. He was more than excited to talk about the capabilities of this handheld piece of paper with a tiny lens. Doctors in third-world countries would have microscopic capabilities in their pocket! It could attach to a phone for projection or imaging. Best of all – it was cheap. Really cheap. Pennies to produce. My mind began to whirl with possibilities in my classroom..but getting my hands on one of these beauties designed by Stanford seemed remote. At least for a while.
This leads to the second funny thing. An email arrived from my friends at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. They had been given a few new microscopes..strange little scopes made out of paper..might I be willing to try them out? Of course! I would get my hands on the Foldscope after all! The microscope arrived in the mail – in a plain manilla envelope. It came with instructions – rivaling the instructions I struggled with to piece together cribs and carseats. A youtube video tutorial made it slightly less intimidating…but, in the end, the real answer resided, as always, within my students.
On our first day out in the field, I handed the Foldscope over to two students who had been tasked with finding rock snot in our local stream. Rock snot is an interesting species. Students here in Dedham had seen a similar, non-invasive species in the past. Scientists at Maine DEP used a microscope to ID the specimen and determined it was a close relative of rock snot (learn more about that by checking out this observation and this video ). So we thought that as we headed out to look for this species again, it would be a good to have a microscope on hand.
The first funny thing happened on a visit to the Jackson Lab. My 7th graders and I were being wowed by the amazing microscopes that they have buried in their basement. The microscope guru walked us through the capabilities of each one and we marveled at how advanced the technology was and how little our classroom models seemed to be able to do. On our way out he said he had saved the most exciting microscope, the one on the cutting edge, the one that was still in the testing phase. I was intrigued. I was especially intrigued when I saw him pull a flat piece of cardboard out of his pocket. Behold – the Foldscope. He was more than excited to talk about the capabilities of this handheld piece of paper with a tiny lens. Doctors in third-world countries would have microscopic capabilities in their pocket! It could attach to a phone for projection or imaging. Best of all – it was cheap. Really cheap. Pennies to produce. My mind began to whirl with possibilities in my classroom..but getting my hands on one of these beauties designed by Stanford seemed remote. At least for a while.
This leads to the second funny thing. An email arrived from my friends at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. They had been given a few new microscopes..strange little scopes made out of paper..might I be willing to try them out? Of course! I would get my hands on the Foldscope after all! The microscope arrived in the mail – in a plain manilla envelope. It came with instructions – rivaling the instructions I struggled with to piece together cribs and carseats. A youtube video tutorial made it slightly less intimidating…but, in the end, the real answer resided, as always, within my students.
On our first day out in the field, I handed the Foldscope over to two students who had been tasked with finding rock snot in our local stream. Rock snot is an interesting species. Students here in Dedham had seen a similar, non-invasive species in the past. Scientists at Maine DEP used a microscope to ID the specimen and determined it was a close relative of rock snot (learn more about that by checking out this observation and this video ). So we thought that as we headed out to look for this species again, it would be a good to have a microscope on hand.
Here are images the students were able to capture after making slides with the Foldscope and using the camera portion of their smartphones. They were able to follow the directions, they asked no questions, and even managed to make a video of a squirming worm they had put on a slide! All of this while sitting on the ground beside a rushing stream. In Maine. In the spring. With hoards of blackflies buzzing about. Not too bad for field microscopy!
~Rhonda Tate
~Rhonda Tate
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