In House Microscope Repair...Literally!

By the end of this past school year, we had collected 7 microscopes that were not working well, or not working at all. As the science department head, I needed to do something about it. I really didn't want to schedule someone to come in to do microscope repair/maintenance since we're a relatively small private school with a smallish science budget. I wanted to maximize how much money we had for supplies and equipment. 

Now, these microscopes are fairly old and don't owe us anything, so I decided to try my hand at microscope repair over this summer. I started a YouTube playlist of microscope cleaning and maintenance videos and started watching them to get an idea of how it may go.  

After doing all of the summer prep that I wanted to do for my classes, it was time to tackle the microscopes.  I had found a maintenance and repair video done by Wards, so I started with our Boreal microscope. This microscope's problem involved slipping out of focus. Once it was focused, the stage would start to slowly go down (and the image would go out of focus). This was remedied by a quick tightening of the focus knob with an allen wrench (AKA a hex key).  This was super exciting, since I had that one working in under 5 minutes.

For every microscope, I wiped it down and cleaned each of the lenses with a drop of lens cleaning solution on a cotton swab. Actually, for one of the microscopes, the issue was a grossly dirty 40x objective lens. Maybe it got immersion oil on it? After a wipe down, the visual field was clear as a bell! Happily, all of the objective lenses unscrewed easily, which just made cleaning them less awkward than trying to do it while still attached. I just cleaned the lenses that faced out, only a few were dirty enough to clean the inside lens as well, but I tried to avoid that as much as possible.

We had two Labomed scopes whose views just looked like gray fuzz. No matter how much I moved the coarse or fine adjustment knobs, all I could see was gray fuzz. I wasn't sure what to do and decided to look up Labomed microscope repair and found exactly the instructions I need to do a focus stop repair. This was a little more involved, but the second one went much faster than the first. It helped to have already collected the correct tools. 

Another problem was with a mechanical stage.  The knob to move the slide forward and backward worked just fine, but the knob that moved it to the left or right kept slipping.  A 7mm socket wrench worked great to tighten the nut under and inside the knob. 

I didn't spend any money on supplies, I just raided my husband's tool supply, my craft supplies and some other items we had in the house. Here's my list...

1. Hex Keys (allen wrench)...1.5 mm and 5/64 in
2. offset box wrench...1/2 inch (although I think I probably could have used the socket wrench, but this was the first thing I found in my rummaging).
3. socket wrench...7 mm
4. cotton swabs
5. (eyeglass) lens cleaner
6. tweezers
7. prepared microscope slides...had to go back to school for these since it's pretty hard to test a microscope with nothing to look at. :)  

 

Sentence Starters for Peer Review on Lab Reports

 I am currently in the middle of a  New Pre-AP Biology Teacher Cohort since my school is adopting the Pre-AP Biology curriculum for our Biology students next year. Today we were talking about the Pre-AP Course Framework and model lessons and how they support our teaching. Then we moved onto challenges that we may have that are not specifically addressed in the teacher supports. As we talked about the peer review that was happening for the student developed model of the carbon and water cycle in the lesson, we discussed of the struggle that students have in giving valuable feedback. One of our moderators suggested that we provide students with sentence starters to help guide them to more valuable feedback. 

This idea immediately resonated with me. After every mini poster presentation we do in class, students provide feedback to the other lab groups before I grade them. Sometimes students give great feedback, but often it is not helpful. For example, a favorite feedback of my students is suggesting that students write more neatly. Since I don't take points off for penmanship, this is not helpful feedback for improving their poster presentations. Usually toward the beginning of the class, after our first experience with peer feedback on these labs, I collect all of the feedback post-it notes and we work as a whole group to classify the feedback as helpful or not helpful. This leads to slightly improved feedback going forward, but still not as valuable as I'd like. 

This year I'm going to provide them with sentence starters to use.  I am debating about how I will provide them. One option is to project the sentence starters on the TV for them to choose as they are doing their peer review.  I could also print them, cut them out, and let students grab them to fill out instead of just giving them blank post-it notes. I've made Google Drawing that I can project, as well as pages of each sentence frame so I could print and students could fill them out. 

Here is the link for the sentence starters to project.

Here's the link for the sentence starters that could be printed and written on.

CIBTs Building Blocks of Life Lego Lab

I found CIBTs Building Blocks of Life lab a couple of years ago, but hadn't found the time to look at it closely and prep the materials for it. You can access all of their files here. Since we ended our school year early last year due to COVID, I spent some time prepping for this lab. To my delight, my Honors Biology class was able to do this lab in person this year. 

The Substrate

For prepping this lab, I found the needed Legos for the lab kits with a quick trip to our local Lego store wall of Legos and then glued the substrates together for each lab group. I felt a little like Mr. Business in the Lego movie with the "Kragle", but I got past it. The Lego wall didn't have a couple of the specific pieces needed for the kit, so we improvised. 

It's hard to see, but this is 3 flat pieces stacked.

All the Legos for 5-6 lab groups fit in this little container.

Part of what drew me to this lab was bringing together the Central Dogma...DNA is the template for RNA is the template for proteins, mutations, and how a mutation may change the shape and often the function of an enzyme.

Besides collecting the needed Legos, I also converted the pdf student lab into a Google Doc so that my students could complete the written portion electronically.

A mutated enzyme

Students first used the instructions to put together the Lego enzymes from an un-mutated sequence.  Then they worked on reading the mutated sequences and translating them into new enzymes, trying to predict if their enzymes would function correctly. It was a very hands-on way of seeing the principle of form follows function.

One of the mutated enzymes

Here are all of the links to the converted Google Docs that I made for the lab.

CIBT Student Background Information

CIBT Building Blocks of Life Lab

CIBT Enzyme Worksheet Page

Immune System Trading Cards and Storyboarding Remotely

I've described the immune system trading cards that my honors biology class makes here. We are remote this week, and we were ready to work on our trading cards. Fortunately, part of the activity is digital anyway. The adjustment that was needed was getting the illustrations onto the cards. 

Usually we pass the cards around and each of the students illustrates their word on every other student's cards. That part is impossible when we are all remote. To adjust, I had each student illustrate their word by hand, take a picture and insert it into the document. I also gave them the option to illustrate the word digitally, they just couldn't copy and paste from the internet. The class was split fairly evenly, with half of the students illustrating by hand and the other half used Google Drawings to put their illustration together. 

Some of our cards from this week.

After we finish the cards, when we are in class, I have them storyboard the immune response to an infection on our lab tables with characters of the immune system that I give them and chalk markers. This time, I put the characters in Google Slides and asks the students to story board in Slides. I love the bird's eye view I get of them working in Slides (even though I can't see all of the students when they are in breakout rooms. It was so much fun watching their storyboards coming together in real time. It allowed me to see some misconceptions as well and address them with the class.

Here's a link to the Google Slides students used to make the storyboard.

Remote Antibiotic Resistance Game Lab

In my Honors Biology class, when we are studying disruptions of homeostasis we do an antibiotic resistance game lab from New Vision's Living Environment curriculum. It's a fairly simple lab...just requiring colored disks and a die.  It gives students a very visual way to see how inconsistent taking of antibiotics can affect the bacteria in their bodies. 

This coming week, we're remote to mitigate any COVID spread after Christmas break, so I needed to convert the antibiotics lab to a remote version. Google Slides are one of my favorite tools when we're remote since I can see what all of my students are doing, even when they are in breakout rooms.  I made slides for each breakout room with plenty of virtual disks. On the slide itself is the number of disks lab groups need to begin with. There are piles of spares on the side to use as needed.  

Students will put their data into a shared Google Sheet and graph the data as well.  I purposely left one of the tables filled in and highlighted to remind me to review with students that they need to add more bacteria after each day.

I have also adjusted the lab document from New Visions to fit my class. I'll link the lab, the Slides and Sheet below.

Student Lab Document

Slides with Disks

Sheets for Data and Graphs