Armed with a smartphone and a few dollars’ worth of trinkets and hardware store supplies, Daniel Miller is helping students gain a new perspective on the world of cellular biology.
Last spring, while Miller was wrapping up his graduate studies in applied and environmental biology, he found a website that showed with inexpensive supplies, a smartphone and a power drill. “I thought I’d give it a try,” says the St. Louis native.
He liked the result and thought this do-it-yourself approach might appeal to some of the undergraduate students in a lab course where he served as a teaching assistant. So he offered extra credit to any of the students in that lab who built their own smartphone-enabled microscope. Fifteen of the 50 took him up on it.
“They love it,” he says. “They get to take it home and can use it to look at specimens whenever they want.”
While the quality of the DIY microscope isn’t on par with the conventional models found in university labs – the most basic smartphone version can enlarge up to 175 times a specimen’s actual size, whereas real microscopes typically enlarge by 600 times – the price is in line with a college student’s budget. And the portability, as Miller points out, is an added benefit.
Now, Miller’s idea is being incorporated into a campus initiative to reimagine instructional labs. Missouri S&T recently received a grant from the University of Missouri System to in five different disciplines: biological sciences, chemistry, civil engineering, physics and nuclear engineering. Based on the results of those experiments in learning, project organizers plan to put together a how-to manual that other colleges and universities could use.
Reviewed 2014-09-03