Re: Purchasing a student microscope

I have some experience with high school students. I have read the
allknowing, such as recommendations for a stereomicroscope first,
which for my students would be great, but not nearly as exciting as
the compound scope.

We have used compound scopes costing about 200-230 US$, and I
recommend them highly for student use. The scopes we have are pretty
much a standard at scientific supply houses, and can be purchased
elsewhere as well. Wolfe brands one, and it's as good as the others.
They are robust: I have several that still work, that are probably 20
years old.

I live on a tropical island, we spend a lot of time looking at
plankton, sand dwelling protozoa, dinoflagellates, diatoms, rotifers
and protozoa, foraminifera. Also invertebrate eggs and larvae. We
also use the scopes for standard Biology labs: plant cell, animal
cell. I really like these scopes, surprizingly, because of the disk
diaphragms! They can be tweaked off center, giving a wonderful dark
ground effect, which I cannot do easily with my Zeiss standard 16,
which I use for demos.

This scope costs less than a boom box, for the price of which you can
even throw in a bunch of slides and coverslips, droppers,
watchglasses, a couple of petri dishes to store slides in.

For a hundred bucks more, or two, you could pick up the same scope w/
oil immersion. At that point, I would probably start looking at ebay,
where I've gotten a couple of good deals, but I've been burned buying
on line as well.

For some, with different interests, the stereomicroscope is a good
choice, but you'll spend a lot more to get one that I would use in a
classroom with salt water around.

And I would immediately buy a couple of loupes, probably coddington,
but preferably hastings triplets, up to 20 X. I got 40 reading
glasses for my classroom. Good investments. My 5 year old son has
fun with these reading glasses.

Good luck,

Alan

.

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