VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
Putting science under the lens I
n our popular View from the classroom feature this month, we go behind the
scenes at Sevenoaks School, an independent school set in a beautiful, 100-acre campus in the Kent countryside. The school’s new state- of-the-art Science and Technology Centre, with its sunlit atrium, was described by the Royal Institute of British Architects as “a great cathedral of a space, full of life and light”. It is here that the pupils of Sevenoaks explore science and technology. The pace of discovery accelerated in March 2021, when the Biology department installed a ZEISS Digital Classroom comprising a suite of 10 networked Primostar 3 microscopes.
Transforming the student experience The school has a strong tradition in Biology, says Karen Mylod, the Head of Biology at Sevenoaks whose department boasts 10 teachers. All pupils take the International GCSE Biology, and of the 400 or so pupils in the sixth form, more than half have chosen Biology as part of their International Baccalaureate diploma programme. Already, the ZEISS Primostar 3 microscopes are
transforming the student experience, says Karen, through their combination of powerful optics, built-in Wi-Fi cameras and networked iPad displays. “The system is great for collaborative work, which students really like to do. For example, when a student finds something interesting under their microscope, the rest of the
class doesn’t need to queue up to stare into the eyepiece – they can just look at the iPad.” The ZEISS Digital Classroom also allows the teacher to monitor the images on each pupil’s microscope and highlight interesting examples on a bigger screen, for the whole class to see.
Inspiring student projects The ZEISS Digital Classroom is also having a big impact on how Sevenoaks sixth formers carry out their research projects, Karen explains. “Our students do an individual project for which they come up with a research question, formulate a hypothesis, and design a practical experiment. The ZEISS Digital Classroom setup is great because collecting good numerical data is so important, and students being able to document their images is a key part of that. It takes away the guesswork, and having to rely on sketches of what they have seen. Instead, students’ images can now be included with their work.” Karen offers an example of a student who
decided to investigate the bold claims of a brand of hair-thickening shampoo. He took five hairs from the heads of 15 other boys and examined those hairs using the ZEISS Primostar 3 microscope. He then had the boys use the shampoo for a week, before taking new hair samples and imaging again. “With our previous set-up, using manual microscopes, this project would have been difficult to achieve, but because we now have the digital microscopes, the pupil
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www.education-today.co.uk November 2021
could measure easily in micrometres using the Labscope app.” All well and good, but what about the important question: did the shampoo deliver on its promise? “I didn’t think the shampoo was going to work, but the difference in the hair – its appearance in his ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, and also in the thickness measurements – was amazing.”
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