Idaho Students Get New Microscopes!

Morning News-submitted photo

Thanks to a grant money awarded life science teachers Eileen Huesits and Alan Southern, students at Mountain View Middle School (MVMS) are enjoying 30 brand new microscopes.

Huesits and Southern applied for the grant through the Summer of Innovation Program (part of the NASA Idaho Space Grant Consortium) right before the deadline earlier this year and were excited to receive the grant money just a few days later.

The Morning News reported that Huestis promptly ordered 10 Swift brand microscopes and that shortly after the scopes arrived, students were busy searching for microbes and observing paramecia and amoebas from samples of local pond water. 

"My students were so excited to be the very first ones to use the microscopes," Huestis told the Morning News. "They enjoyed seeing all the little crawly things from nice, heavy microscopes with good eyepieces and lenses."

Before replacing the microscopes with new Swift ones, the microscopes Huestis' students were using had been in use since the school opened in the 1970s. 

On Huestis' class agenda for the rest of the year: observing human cheek cells, yogurt cultures and mitosis in onion root tip cells.