Have you ever looked at something through a microscope? If so, you know how amazing even the most simple of things can be! A dead bug in plain vision isn't super interesting (rather gross actually), but put it under a microscope and the dead bug becomes a fascinating object. You can see the details of its feathery wings, its stinger, the small grippy parts of its legs. So many amazing details become visible when you look at an item under magnification. As science educators, we love to show students how even the very mundane items in life can be magnificent. The best way to do this is to use magnification and so we bring students our two old dissecting microscopes (at least 50 years old each) and they all take turns crowding the microscope to see what can be revealed. Its a fantastic way to ignite passion for science in young students, a great way to teach students about body parts or how parts of an object relate to its greater whole, or to just show students that there is a whole world out there that we can't even see with our plain eyes.
As a small non-profit we work with thousands of elementary-aged students every year. Our two old microscopes still work, but they are difficult to transport and we only have two of them. So what we'd really love to do is to get a few more microscopes so we can share the world of magnification with more students at once. Ideally we'd look to purchase digital microscopes that have an LED display screen. The larger screens help with visually impaired students but also just make it so much easier for small eyes to see the item (many young students can quite get the hang of using both eyes to see into the old microscopes).
So we'd like to bring the invisible items of the natural world into view for young students and to better do this we need some microscopes!