During the early days of the pandemic I took a spectacularly unsuccessful stab at homeschooling my kids. One bright light during that time came in the form of a gift my mom had shipped to our house (was there any bigger event than a visit from a delivery driver in 2020?). It was a small digital microscope I had been seeing in advertisements pushed at me online, just the type of thing I want but never purchase for myself. The kids weren't able to see their grandparents much that spring, and one day on the phone my mom asked if there was anything she could order for them.
The microscope wasn't a traditional upright instrument, but a wand, slightly bigger than a highlighter, with its own small light in the tip. We just held it up to things we wanted to see magnified. Through the magic of a tiny localized wi-fi signal, the images popped up on my phone, where I could snap photos.
The evening it arrived, my wife and I shut off the TV and just started looking at stuff. Couch fibers. The dog’s fur. My leg hair. All a welcome respite from Tiger King. Then - big mistake - a small cut on my hand, the sight of which, magnified 10 times, made us both cry out in horrified surprise.
That brought the kids out of their rooms, and the rest is history. The microscope was definitely a curiosity bomb, and led to a lot of great scientific enquiry around the house, especially the question that has plagued microscope users down through history all the way back to the very first one, old Antony van Leeuwenhoek, himself: “Why is everything so gross when you look at it up close?”
But the microscope also begged another question, which became the name for a game we often played, “What the Heck Is That?” Since it was such an easy game (all you had to do was look at weird photos I took of stuff around the house magnified and guess what they were), we sometimes played it a few times a week, and Grandma could also play, via text.
It's been a long time since I thought of those days, or used the microscope, but it all came back to me the other day when I was going through some children’s books recently donated to the library by the KU Natural History Museum. One book, Small Worlds Close Up, by Lisa Grillone and Joseph Gennaro, is basically an extended game of “What the Heck Is That?” Thumbing through it reminded me how much fun it is to look at stuff up close. So I dug out the old microscope, blew the dust off, and took some photos.
Let’s play! All you have to do is guess what's in each photo and click for the answer.
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Here's the same thing much closer up, though:
Thanks for playing! If you have a kid in your life who may want to take a closer look at things, check out these great microscope-related titles in the library's children's collection.
Usborne Complete Book of the Microscope
A WORLD IN A DROP OF WATER: EXPLORING WITH A MICROSCOPE
SMALL MATTERS: THE HIDDEN POWER OF THE UNSEEN
-Dan Coleman is a Senior Collection Development Librarian at Lawrence Public Library.
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