Microscoops

Hey hey hey.

The other day was basically Christmas at Twende workshop here in Arusha. We got MICROSCOPES!

(https://www.mccrone.com/mm/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/foldscope.jpg)

They’re samples of the Foldscope, an invention from PrakashLab at Stanford, a team that’s democratizing science by making microscopes affordable to scientists, students, and curious people around the world. A whole Foldscope costs about a dollar, fits in a pocket, and stands up to being dropped, thrown or stepped on because it’s made out of cardstock. The microscopes also came with little magnets for attaching them to phone cameras to take pictures. So, here are some of the first pictures we took:

 From left to right: a dead butterfly I found on my walk to work, the end of that butterfly's foot, the edge of that butterfly's wing.

These pictures were taken with the Foldscope’s low magnification lens. Next, I want to try out the higher magnification lens to see what I can find in different sources of drinking water around here. Hopefully we can integrate these microscopes into some of our school workshops. Let me know in the comments if you think of any cool tiny things to look at or any good uses for a pocket microscope. For more information, check out the Foldscope website and the online community of Foldscop-ists.

Creative Capacity Building

Hi everybody.

I was up to my eyeballs in grant applications last week, so instead of blogging about that, why don’t I describe what we’d do with some that money...

Twende runs trainings for all kinds of people around the Arusha region of Tanzania. Sometimes we invite people into the workshop, and sometimes we take the workshop to them. Our central training is "Creative Capacity Building (CCB)", a method developed at MIT D-Lab and taught at IDIN workshops and summits around the world (d-lab.mit.edu/creative-capacity-building). The specifics of the training get adapted for the location and participants, but the fundamental idea is the same: teaching people the skills they need to design and build technologies that fill unmet needs in their own lives. Over the course of the program, participants learn to use tools, identify challenges in their lives that can be met with technologies, then design and build technologies to meet those challenges.

Here are some examples of innovations that came out of past CCBs:

A group of farmers made this beehive out of materials that are cheap and easy to find in their village.

A woman who makes and sells a bunch of different handcrafts designed this punch to make leather keychains.

 Students from a girls' education organization prototyped a vegetable cutter to cut down on time they spend cooking.

 Students from a local school made a hand-crank maize sheller.

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I’m working on adapting CCB training and other Twende curricula to be relevant and useful to specific audiences like small business owners or secondary school girls. Hopefully in a few months, we'll have grant funding for more programs.