Science Experiment for kids (Part II)

Lettuce epidermal cells as seen under this microscope (400x)


The microscope in the above photo only costs me $100 dollars. At first I doubted its performance even the technical description printed on the box is satisfactory (e.g. Maximum magnification power of 400X with built-in light source etc). I tried this microscope with some onion epidermal cells and the perfomance is great. The nucleus and cell wall could be seen without difficulty. My daughter showed great interest in using the microscope to observe other specimens such as Kiwi fruit's cells, red grape's skin, soil samples, leaf epidermis, hair follicle and mouth cheek cells. To our surprise, all these specimens could been clearly seen under 100X magnification. We tried higher magnification such as 400X but the image was blurred owing to the weak light source. Anyway, this minor problem can be solved by the provision of an external light source. The 'toy-nature' of this microscope does not dwarf its ability of showing your kids the microscopic world. In fact, It extends the visual sense of your kids to the unseen world. Maybe it is another way of 'widening the horizon' of your kids.