A few months ago I was introduced to a cool website called sciencedemo.org which is a site dedicated to describing various scientific demonstrations as well as their significance and importance in the classroom. I am a big fan of demonstrations and love to do them when I can so I perused this site and found a link to a posting called “Mobile Phone Microscopy” (Nov, 1st 2013 posting). The video (which originates from instructables.com – an amazingly cool site) showed how one could make a simple microscope using a couple of pieces of plexiglass, a laser lens, and a smartphone.
This peaked my curiosity because 1) just about all my students have a smart phone, and 2) this looked to be a cool way to get people access to an affordable microscope.
In thinking about this a bit I thought this would be a great project for my students in my Cellular and Molecular Biology course to make as a great way to conveniently look at life at the cellular level. To make things even better the cameras on smart phones have excellent resolution and additional magnification that, as a result, can produce some amazing amateur images.
Here are their final versions (took a couple of tries to work out some manufacturing issues):
Setup and orientation with a portable light source (LED light)
Smartphone microscope in action
Prototype#2 is a go
After all was said and done I took one of the microscopes over to the nearby pre-school to see if they would like to play with it. They liked it but it wasn’t too “pre-schooler”-durable. I think next year I may make a more concerted effort to get more of these made for some of the local elementary /middle schools around. One issue that may come up may be their policies of students having smartphones. At the very least this would work for teachers to take around in the field and get images for their students.
Yuma Scientist 