Perspective Microscope Project
To tie into our team prospective project we we made microscopes to look at common objects and zoomed in on them (literally) to find their beauty. These microscopes will be recreated and passed on to younger generations in the High Tech Village so students can continue to look and learn from the perspectives we built.
Creation of Our Cell Phone Microscope
The hope of our microscope was that it was unique and efficient, and I think we achieved that. Our goal was to win the creative design award and we did not receive this because there was not enough time to pass out awards (so no one received any awards). Unfortunately, due to AP testing, I was not at school for the first couple of days of brainstorming. When I got back to school my group, Kat, Makenna, and Kristen, told me that we were planning on making our microscope out of legos. I was unsure of this idea at first because it didn't seem practical, but it definitely grew on me as we started building. We decided to make our design off of the picture/website to the right. Essentially, we would enclose our lens in a lego box that was black inside and put the "common object" or what we want to zoom in on, on the tray below it. Below are some pictures that we were thinking we would go off of.
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Our microscope did not go as plan, because Will had a problem with ordering/receiving the microscope lenses. As a result we got the wrong size lens. Unlike many other groups, my group was very good at adapting to this unfortunate situation. Instead of dwelling on the fact that our original plan wouldn't work we experimented with new ideas. I was very proud of how well my group worked together. I felt like because things didn't work perfectly we had to bounce ideas off of each other or else our microscope would not work, and as a result of this we grew as a team. In the end, we screwed in the tiny microscope lens into a wood square that we laser cut to fit perfectly in the lego box. Our microscope works by putting our common object inside the lego box then sealing it in with a another lego piece. In order to see the object through the lens you must either use a flash light or natural light coming from the bottom of the microscope, or else the object is too dark to make out.
What we Decided to Photograph
We photographed a few different objects to see which one would turn out the best. We decided to stick with only photographing nature because we were interested in looking at what we had learned so much about this year in biology. One object that we photographed was a leaf. In the zoomed in version you can see the small veins of the leaf that send nutrients and water to the rest of the leaf. It's interesting to see how your perspective shifts in the different images and is helpful to use these microscopes to put into practice what we learnt this year in biology.