
A MacArthur winner wants every child in the world to own a microscope - sonabinu
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/macarthur-winner-wants-every-child-world-microscope/
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pmoriarty
_" Manu Prakash is a physical biologist.. His most lauded invention is a $1
foldable, paper microscope. He wants every child in resource-poor settings or
elsewhere to own one."_

Have you ever noticed how famous writers often talk about how important
reading and writing are, and how both are unfairly marginalized in schools?

Or how mathematicians lament the poor state of mathematical education, and how
more focus should be placed on it in school?

Or computer scientists or programmers talk about how more kids should learn
programming in school?

Artists and musicians are in the same boat as the writers, as the humanities
are pushed aside in favor of STEM.

I'm not disagreeing with any of them. Education all around should and could be
improved. I'm also not begrudging the leaders of any discipline for trying to
get more interest in or more funding for the field they're most interested in
and made a career in themselves (though there is a bit of a conflict of
interest there). But it does make it difficult to decide just from these
endorsements, which all tend to be very persuasive, as to which field to fund
and prioritize.

Since the US is overall a very practical and business/career-focused country,
it's not surprising that it would favor STEM over the humanities, but I do
think it's kind of sad and that the country is losing something of great
value. Life is not all about careers and technology, as much as those are the
drivers of the US economy and the things that put bread on the table.

~~~
heymijo
We do ourselves a disservice by thinking about subjects as silos. What is
unique to each subject is less interesting than what each has in common,
especially in regard to the particular practices and mindsets of the people in
each discipline.

Some people seem to get this, see how STEM morphed into STEAM (adding arts),
yet it is rarely translated into practice in schools.

~~~
timthorn
I don't underplay the importance of the arts, but I believe that the STEAM
movement confuses the message - STEAM is effectively (education - humanities).
The point of STEM as a grouping is to create a classifier for the numerate
disciplines; a subject grouping that, at least amongst primary teachers in the
round, is not strong.

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pbhjpbhj
Why own?

Have access to, well for sure, seems good. But own one? Many 100s of millions
of people will then have a piece of kit they use once or twice and then
discard - a monumental waste.

Hopefully this is just reporting.

We need to share much much more. Yes, make amazing cheap instruments and
educational tools, but share them. There's little utility in owning duplicates
of what everyone else owns when you only use your copy once or twice (per time
period).

In this instance each school having a class-set and library (or similar local
amenity) owning lend-able microscopes would seem more than enough to make them
available to everyone.

We bought ourselves a microscope as a family gift one christmas (c.5 years
ago, Biolux NV [1]) it cost us less than that). It's had little use, primarily
because we don't have enough room to have it set up (it gets dusty and needs
cleaning a lot as well when it's out) and the desire to have a look at things
that are super-small is often better served by looking it up on the internet.
What does the yeast we just experimented with (we're making cider!) look like
close up ... we could spend time getting the microscope set up, or take 30s
and see it on the web. We do sometimes do it ourselves but usually you see
more from looking at web images.

[1] [http://amzn.to/2dbFuLm](http://amzn.to/2dbFuLm), aff link, wouldn't
necessarily recommend it - it's OK, but I wouldn't pay that price, ~£50 is
about right IMO. The cross table is a bit wonky and the USB camera relatively
poor (works with Cheese on Kubuntu, but takes some getting going).

~~~
schiffern
>a piece of kit they use once or twice and then discard

You're not thinking big enough. Microscopes aren't just a teaching tool,
they're a powerful tool for observation of the world.

One example is soil microbiology identification, which can be learned in a
couple days and used to guide rehabilitation of degraded agricultural
soils.[1] A microscope can reveal pathogens in polluted water. And not to
mention all the medical procedures that boil down to "prep it and look at it
through a microscope."

The kids of today are the scientists and technologists of tomorrow.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag)

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tgb
The best gift I've given recently is a ~$10 hand-held 100x microscope. Super
durable and tiny and fun to play with. Good for all ages. I think it was this
one: [https://www.amazon.com/Carson-60X-100X-MicroMax-
Microscope-M...](https://www.amazon.com/Carson-60X-100X-MicroMax-Microscope-
MM-200/dp/B000P8AUMU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474815916&sr=8-1&keywords=hand-
held+microscope) The main downside over a 'real' microscope is that it's not
back-lit and can't really be used with slides, which means you can't really
look at microbes. But there's still a ton of things you can examine at that
zoom level, like the fibers in your clothing, that you otherwise totally miss.

~~~
astazangasta
Seems pretty easy to combine with a $4 LED flashlight for a light source.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Or an LED video light. Slightly more expensive ($13), but is flat and comes
with a diffuser to provide pretty uniform light, so should me much easier to
use with microscope slides. This one even has adjustable brightness:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00SWIKYIU/&qid=1474820232](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00SWIKYIU/&qid=1474820232)

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david-given
The official website at [http://www.foldscope.com](http://www.foldscope.com)
is largely content-free, but here's a decent article on it:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/one-
dolla...](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/one-dollar-
origami-microscope-foldscope/403156/)

There's also a formal paper describing it; there's more to it than first
appears:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0098781)

Kickstarter campaign coming, apparently. I want one.

~~~
bdg
It drives me bonkers that there's no details on where I can get the lens, or
paper template. I get that I'm not the market, but I still don't see "why
not". I know they made the lens themselves, but specs or something would be
great for me.

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duaneb
What use does a child have of a microscope? This is a serious question. The
microscopes I had access to as a well-off kid in the US could never see
anything interesting: just what I see normally but bigger, not the detail I
expected. It wasn't until college I could come close to replicating anything I
read about in textbooks.

Wouldn't books provide more sustainable and reliable education? What makes
this the better investment?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Things in nature are fascinating - seeds and ferns and sand and bark - its a
whole new world. Even a magnifying glass opens up vista.

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bdg
I'm an adult with a good income... and I have a $600 microscope on my wish
list just because I think it would be great to have one (the same way other
people have home theater systems, I build out a home lab).

~~~
DavidWanjiru
You and me are thinking similar thoughts. Something else I want to do, you see
how people build public libraries and community libraries? I want to build
public and community laboratories. Chemistry, physics, biology labs that any
random kid or adult can walk into and do science stuff for free or for as
close as possible to free. With smallish libraries that have all the books
related to that stuff.

~~~
bdg
My local library (Toronto) has a "digital innovation hub" where you can use 3d
printers, 3d scanners, studio video cameras, green screens, DJ decks, and
Arduino. I think it is a step in the right direction for libraries.

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mncharity
In addition to describing and drawing what you see, and manipulating the
environment on a slide, a helpful activity is to imagine things zoomed bigger.

My "Remembering Sizes 2015"
[http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE](http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE)
has a video "What is micro view?" that illustrates this for 1000x.

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z3t4
The child microscopes you buy in toy-stores are almost as good as the real
ones, i got one with 900x when I was a kid. It was a bit tricky to get a good
focus but totally usable. Used it to look at all kind of stuff. Could probably
use it for lab analysis.

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plg
are the microscopes edible

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justin_vanw
Well as nice as it is for kids to have things, and I'm sure someday humanity
will be wealthy enough in all locations on the globe to afford this, we should
probably start with basic sanitation, vaccinations, nutrition, and education,
... (500 other things more important) ... and then microscopes, in about that
order.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Great inroads have been made in those areas. Lets not fall victim to the
'false dichotomy' \- because we're doing one thing, we shouldn't be doing
another thing. "Why go into space when we have problems here at home?" We'd
all never get out of bed with that philosophy.

~~~
justin_vanw
It's not a false dichotomy, it's an actual dichotomy. Handing out microscopes
vs handing out malaria medicine. If you can do both, that is wonderful, but we
aren't even doing the malaria medicine very well, it's probably not time to
start figuring out our microscope plan.

But lets just be honest here, getting every kid in the world a microscope is a
dumb idea. Most kids that have microscopes don't use them, they collect dust,
and then get thrown away eventually. For the handful of kids that actually use
them, the kind of microscope you would be able to afford to give out to
everyone would be a piece of crap.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Again, when your favorite charity is not doing well, to lash out at other
successful charities is disingenuous. We could all be handing out malaria
medicine personally, no? But instead to choose to try to deconstruct other
successes instead - I call hypocrisy.

~~~
justin_vanw
What? I don't know what you're talking about here.

I'm talking about basic human needs. A microscope is a dumb thing to hand to
someone that is hungry.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Talking about, its not an actual dichotomy because one doesn't preclude the
other. At all.

