MicroscopyEducation
STEM/STEAM 2022 Elaine Humphrey Advanced Microscopy Facility, University of Victoria, Canada
ech@uvic.ca
Abstract: Many universities, commercial companies, and science orga- nizations who use microscopy have outreach programs. The members of such generally love to share their enthusiasm and passion with the next generation. Content and confidence on providing such a program often comes from sharing ideas with like-minded scientists. These pro- grams are typically delegated with the acronym STEM or STEAM: sci- ence, technology, engineering, art, and math. One of MSA’s outreach programs is ProjectMICRO. Included are some STEAM ideas to share.
Keywords: microscopy, outreach, STEM, STEAM, Women in Science, ProjectMICRO
By now, most people will have heard of STEM in schools—
science, technology, engineering and math. Tese days though, we talk about STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art, and math for a more rounded education. Microscopy is one of those subjects that covers the lot. Students will oſten make up their minds in middle school
whether they want to go into the sciences. Most (∼95%) of the teachers in middle school come from the Arts program and some- times need a little assistance with the sciences. Fortunately, they have more and more avenues to go to for this assistance. Most uni- versities and science associations, such as the Microscopy Society of America (MSA), have outreach programs. In the case of the MSA, it is called ProjectMICRO, which mostly targets middle school students, but can be adapted for any age. Part of our plan for getting more science into schools, as well as talking to the students, has been to excite the teachers. If the teachers are excited by the subject, they can inspire the whole class! Why should the teach- ers be made excited? Maybe because the more we can encourage students into a STEM career, the more chance some of the world’s problems will be solved. Young people have shown they can be passionate about such global problems as climate change and sus- tainable energy, even asking questions such as “What happened to the dinosaurs?” or “How can we live on Mars?” Helping teachers to help young people, as well as encouraging students to go to work on these problems, will eventually help us all. My predecessor as chair of ProjectMICRO, Caroline
Schooley, arranged a collaboration of MSA with the GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) program out of Law- rence Berkeley labs in California (
www.lawrencehallofscience .org/educators/gems). Tey put together a book of ten micro- scope activities (stations) for schools, which is still relevant today (
https://store.lawrencehallofscience.org/Item/gems- microscopic-explorations) (Figure 1). Once you start working with these stations, other stations come to mind. I have 15 different stations now. My confidence
38 doi:10.1017/S1551929522000906
on using these stations came from networking at the annual Microscopy & Microanalysis (M&M) meetings. One of my best mentors, Janet Schwarz, now retired from the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Vermont, still uses the program in schools and libraries in her area ( Figure 2). Increasingly, as members of MSA retire, it is one way to pass on their knowledge to inspire the next generation and have fun. Just before COVID struck, I was privileged to receive a
tabletop scanning electron microscope (SEM; TM4000Plus) from Hitachi to take into schools as part of their STEM Out- reach program (
https://www.inspirestemeducation.us/). All the major microscopy manufacturers produce tabletop SEMs, but Hitachi has developed a worldwide STEM program to inspire children to go into the sciences, with several nodes in the USA loaning SEMs to schools and science museums. As COVID spread, so did the opportunity to interact digi-
tally with remote schools who would probably not have been able to visit the University because of the cost of travel and time. Now, via Zoom, even when the students are isolated they can still come as a class to the University, as the University has a site license for 300 Zoom connections at a time. I usually have two goals in my talks: one, no one is to go to sleep, and two, I want at least one “Wow!” from every member of the audience. Fortu- nately, with scanning electron microscopy, this is not difficult. One of the key ingredients to engaging the whole class is to
have the right specimens and stories about the specimens. Luck- ily, having a giſt of a “specimen that keeps on giving” helps. I live on the coast, and coastlines around the world have eelgrass beds. Tey are important for all sorts of reasons including fish nurser- ies, world oxygen production, and erosion reduction. When a piece of eelgrass came floating by our sailboat a summer ago, I dried it on the deck in the sunshine. Mounting sections on a stub with carbon tape and then gold coating was all the preparation needed for the tabletop SEM, though sometimes we can get away without coating. One of the advantages of a tabletop SEM is that you can put damp material into it and use backscattered elec- trons, reducing the charge effect. Resolution is limited, but for most insects or plant materials there is enough to thrill the class. Te eelgrass had a whole ecosystem living on it, but mostly
diatoms. Every time we look at it, we find another species. Te excitement of discovery is infectious. At the time of writing, we are up to over 50 species of diatoms and a few microscopic animals (Figure 3). For the younger children (and older), rather than bore them with a list of species names, they are asked “what does it remind you of” in the typical fashion of Kerry Ruef from
www.microscopy-today.com • 2022 July
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