"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.
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.
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.
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, 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).
>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.
He invented a $1 (paper) microscope. Sure, not everyone needs to own one, but proliferation of microscopes and proficiency in their use would be an obvious good.
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... 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.
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:
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.
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?
I always wanted this kind of "science stuff" as a kid but never did much with it when I got it. Usually it was kinda boring. One exothermic reaction or pond-water-under-a-microscope or whatever is pretty much like any other. In the case of microscopes, thats doubly true now that you can see better images of just about anything you'd care to on the Internet. None of the equipment seemed to be in service of any goal, and I didn't find it interesting in itself. Just going out and watching animals or bugs do animal or bug stuff required little or no equipment and was more fun.
OTOH I got really into collecting fossils, so what do I know about what is and isn't fun?
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).
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.
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.
I want one with a 4K video chip, high-enough quality optics to match the 4K sensor, and a connector capable of streaming the 4K video to the TV. It would be nice if it were modular, so you could get one sensor unit and two bases: a 10-20x for looking at bugs, fingertips, etc., and a 300-1200x for cells in tissue or micro-organisms.
The whole family could sit on the sofa in front of the TV with the microscope and explore together.
(And yes I would want to be able to press a button and get high-quality screen captures that could be offloaded via a USB port.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both of you are right (or wrong). Microscopes for kids are good no matter the access to more basic needs, but not all the children should get them - only a small percentage.
Author, as well as many other smart people, got consumed by his own world and his activities and mistakes them for everything that matters. Actually, what author, or programmers, or other specialists, are doing is but a fraction of things people should do. So not all kids should have microscopes, not all kids should be taught how to program etc.
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.