With the Public Lab Community Microscope, your students can explore the invisible microscopic world around them using a microscope they've built themselves! This microscope is the result of many teams' work coming together. You can learn more about the journey on our Kickstarter

On this page, you can:

• Learn more about the educator community at Public Lab
• Purchase Community Microscope Kits for your classroom
• Get instructions for assembling your microscope
• Find lessons designed around the Community Microscope
• Get help from the FAQ, or ask your own question

Education & Public Lab: Get Involved!

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We're creating a strong community of practice where educators of all experiences can sharing resources, knowledge, and lend a hand. You can learn more about this here.

Getting Classroom Kits For Your School

We offer a variety of tools and kits that can be used in educational settings. We offer a 10% discount on bulk educational purchases, and we are always happy to work with educators to make suggestions and prepare custom orders to meet your needs.

(Embed links to buy Classroom Kits Here)

****This may change as we update store listings

Assembling Your Community Microscopes

Assembling the Microscope Base:

(Make assembly video)

For step-by-step instructions on how to assemble your microscope, click here. (Link to new assembly note that needs to be updated with Make images)

Converting a Webcam to a Microscope

For step-by-step instructions on how to convert your webcam, click here.

Using the Community Microscope

Here we would curate a list of lessons for the microscope. Pin the Hello World Activity (would it be an interesting video?) Use a tag like 'edu-microscope-lesson' to get things to show up here.

Get Help

Here is where we'd put our curated FAQ. Undecided whether this would look like a research note that we add to or a list of questions with a special tag that others are unlikely to use. I think if we use questions there needs to be a way to mark an "answer" even if it's a staff member compiling the best bits and pieces from the comments to make one cohesive answer"