More lab ideas

My last lab idea didn't work out. Although my school had a balance, it didn't have any weights for it. Fail. So that one's on hold until we can order one.

In the meantime, I was recently reminded of a cool program by a company called Aspex. This company makes Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEM) and has a program currently called Send Us Your Samples in which anyone can send a sample in with this form, have it scanned under they're SEM and the results are posted to their online gallery.

It's not exactly science in and of itself, but SEMs are frequently used to do science. The key difference is that science involves asking questions and drawing conclusions.

So my plan is to ask my students to come up with some questions they could answer with the help of a SEM. One idea I had was asking what happen to cells if they're exposed to UV light. I'm going to pose this challenge to them today and give them a week to submit ideas to me and then I'll choose a few to send in and see what sorts of things we can learn!