By Callum Ludwig
Upper Yarra Secondary College (UYSC) students have had access to a special piece of equipment for their science lessons recently.
The school was temporarily provided access to a scanning electron microscope (SEM) for two weeks, allowing students to get a greater look at the composition of different items.
Science teacher Julieanne Kannangara said students would not have had the opportunity to use one if it wasn’t for the grant.
“It magnifies images way more than the normal light compound microscopes that we have, so students can compare what they see from this microscope to our normal school microscope, and we’ve let the students go out and pick little things that they want to look at like dog hair, leaves or a banana peel,” she said.
“I was telling the students before that when I was a student we never had opportunities to use something like that and I have friends who are high up in science and would to use something like this.”
Compared to a light compound microscope, the SEM has a larger depth of field allowing for a greater focus on a bigger area of a sample, and can magnify closely spaced or smaller specimens with their higher resolution.
Year 10 student Peter was using the SEM and said before using it, he wouldn’t have thought he would have had no interest in it at all.
“As soon as I got to see the scale of it, it just made me want to do this more, I want to get all this stuff and it got to the point where I asked teachers if I could use it later just to get through all the stuff I wanted to look at,” he said.
“It’s absolutely amazing, we’ve looked at microchips, dirt, feathers and what Archer and I were looking at before was a big ball of fluff and it’s amazing how much you can’t see of this stuff.”
The SEM was lent to UYSC by the Gene Technology Access Centre (GTAC) in Parkville.
