Hi everyone, so my name is Ben, I'm a PhD student at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
I've already run a set of services, there we go, and I'm also part of the Open Fletcher Project,
where we deal with open source macroscopy.
So, what is the Open Fletcher Project?
In particular, what is the Open Fletcher microscope?
That is our main focus of research of development,
but it's a locally-manufacturable, customized, 3D printed microscope.
It's capable of sub-micromesolution, which means we can look within the cell,
all the way down to the layer of parasite.
It's a dance with a different image and modalities in use cases,
and is used globally around the world, and has been built in 60 different countries,
and it's been an all-saving continent, and yes, that doesn't include Antarctica.
And before we get into the Open Education side of it,
it would be criminal of me to show you a microscope, I'm not showing it to an images.
So, on the top row, we have what we call scanning stitch images,
so these are hundreds, maybe thousands of fields of views,
but we stitch together into one large image at the end,
and along the bottom, there's just some single field of views.
Okay, so through customization and documentation,
the Open Photoshop microscope can be adapted to different educational levels.
So all the way from high school, where the ages are 12 to 18,
we're going to be used in a classroom or a STEM club,
all the way up to pathology education being used in clinics, hospitals, medical schools,
all around the world.
I'm going to talk about both today,
and one of the best ways to deliver this education as content
for the Open Photoshop microscope is to do workshops.
I'm not doing the best to do one of these workshops around the world.
For example, in Ghana,
there was a workshop hosted by Africa Olsh,
or Africa Open Source Hardware,
where they were at most of young people,
and they were trying to empower the next generation of scientists.
They came in, they built up some microscopes,
they calibrated them, and got to use them a bit.
In Sweden, there was a workshop hosted by Pierre,
who is here today actually,
for teachers to come in and learn to build and calibrate the microscope,
and one of my favorite examples was in Ukraine.
So the Mika Lab Water Hub hosted a workshop in Kiev
to build Open Photoshop microscopes
that were eventually deployed for analyzing water samples
in the Mika Lab Water Hub.
So I'm going to start talking about the high school,
side of things,
and interesting projects are vital high schools.
And we feel that the Open Photoshop microscope sets
perfectly at the intersection of almost every single stem subject.
We have engineering,
where everything's due to printed,
due to printed is very exciting.
People in high schools maybe don't get to get to interact with it so much.
And there's obviously a lot of hands on assembly.
You actually get to use tools, you get to assemble a microscope
from the ground up,
which leads into a great kind of help for physics.
A lot of lab equipment, especially in high schools,
ends up being a kind of black box,
where you don't really know what it's going on inside of it.
If you don't really ever properly learn how it works
or get a feel for the consequences of
making a state during the build.
So within a flash of microscope,
you get to learn about the optical path of a bright field microscope.
You really get to understand,
what's the consequence of the illumination
not being in the right place or the bright height?
And of course, you can do lots of other cool physics concepts.
Anything to do with light,
we can probably get something going on the microscope.
Another big one is computing science.
So all of our software is written in Python.
There's a lot of support, there's a lot of libraries
that are all designed for the Open Photoshop microscope.
So it'd be very, very easy for high school pupils
to have hands on it and write their own little scripts
to control the microscope.
Personally, I think that would be a really exciting way
to learn computing science in a high school.
When I was in high school, learning writing science,
I would write 20 lines of code that eventually
just set whole of the world.
And I was like, this is cool, but I think it would be very cool
to have a mix of set on my desk
and write a lot of code for that.
And when I press go, I actually see the mix go move.
Now, obviously, I said this sets the intersection of STEM,
which means maybe there's going to be some teachers who
aren't as well first in writing code.
In which case, we have drag and drop scripting
available as well.
So they can drag pre-written commands
and write their own scripts to run in the microscope.
And last but certainly not least,
I'm probably most obvious, biology.
And biologists love to look at their microscopes
and with a range of different magnifications available,
we have the ability to study lots of different cells
and see lots of different biological development.
So we've always believed that the old
and place of microscope would be ideal for a classroom,
not only because of its STEM qualities,
but also because it gives access to pupils
on modern instrumentation being used around the world,
which is something they will get the chance to do otherwise.
But the question is how do we disseminate this information
to as many schools as possible without the 17 members
having to go to each individual school
and talk to every teacher that they can?
We need to be having conversations with teachers
about the problems with engaging high school pupils
or just integrating new technologies into high schools.
So,
I've sent it, so watch up on my own.
And that's exactly what I did.
So the plan for the workshop was to bring the unit air,
it was to bring the teachers to the university instead of the students,
and this means that each teacher can go back to a class of 30
and talk about the most school themselves.
So, instead of trying to get 150 pupils into the university,
we managed to get the word of 150 pupils through five different teachers.
We've taught them how to build and use the microscope
was also having informed the structure discussions about high school education.
It was designed to be simple and interactive.
I didn't want to, you know, be really, really stripped of the times
throughout the day.
I wanted to feel relaxed.
I wanted them to talk to each other and me.
There was lots of really interesting observations
going on through the whole thing.
I most importantly, we now have education specialists
who could teach about our microscope.
These people are trained to get the most of high school pupils.
They are trained to interact with high school pupils.
When I was in high school, I wasn't very good interacting with other high school pupils.
So, I kind of want them to do it.
And yes, so on the day, some of the day,
we introduced them to the open-fletcher project
and the benefits of open-source hardware software and education.
All the teachers that were in attendance were physics teachers,
but at least in Scotland,
sort of early years in high school,
your physics teacher is also your biology teacher and your chemistry teacher.
So, they had a lot of interesting points of views from different sides of STEM.
But they also came from different schools,
which really fed into the conversation of,
each school is going to have their own problems.
Some schools are going to be more financially stable.
They can invest more into new equipment.
Others, not so much.
I threw out the whole workshop feedback was given,
so tricky parts of the build are just unclear parts of these structures.
It's just something that we're always looking to develop and always improve.
So, I mentioned that we had a lot of informal discussions.
What came out of these informal discussions?
What are some of the challenges that they highlighted to me?
Well, I'm going to start a go through it in a list of questions.
So, before the workshop even started, I had to answer this question.
When is the best time for teachers to attend a workshop like this?
If you want teachers to work with you on your Open Educational Project,
whether it be documentation, whether it be hardware, software, whatever it is,
you need to work with them in mind.
And that means that you have to plan around them.
It's much easier to get you away from your workshop than it will be to get your teachers away from their classroom.
So, I had my own ideas about when there should be, but I thought I'd still ask them.
And what they said was that there's two best times, either the very beginning of the academic year,
where things haven't really going to fill steam yet,
or, for example, in Scotland,
between April and May, all of the senior students,
so that's going to be about half of the school, are away on study leave.
So, you've immediately caught a teacher's teaching time in half,
and it just gives a much more chance to come and do a workshop like this.
Any other time the year collides with exams or projects or missions.
And they are keen to come to these workshops.
Part of, again, I can only be speaking from the Scotland side of things,
but part of what teachers have to do in Scotland is to continue its professional development.
So, going to workshops like this helps with that,
and it takes a box for them.
So, wage groups are most likely to use an open-flection microscope.
This is not even a question that I thought I'd have to ask.
I wrongfully assume that every single age group in a high school could actually come in
and do every part of the project.
I was wrong.
So, what they said was building an open-flection microscope
could only be done by the senior students, that's 16 to 18 year olds.
They said the younger years just wouldn't have the patience and the temperament
to work through the instructions.
We have incredibly detailed instructions that we developed for many, many years.
But they said, yeah, they're not going to leave the words.
They're just going to look at the pictures.
Which I hadn't really considered.
But this is the out of benefit of older people being given a sense of pride
that they've developed a bit of the made-up development that for years to come,
people are going to use.
And that can be quite hard to find in high schools.
Yeah, and then they said, any new user who just feeds back into that
project thing, then they also highlighted the teachers,
which is one of these devices at the front of their classroom
where they can interactively show an entire classroom at 30,
the same sample at the same time that they're having to lay in everybody
up at an IPs.
They can explore it together, they can capture images together.
And it just makes the whole classroom experience more interactive and collaborative.
And the big question that I asked them was,
what are the barriers to integrating doing virtual Mexico into high schools?
Or indeed, what are the barriers to integrating any new technology into high schools?
They already have a very tight curriculum.
So how are they going to fit this in?
Well, unfortunately, the main issue that came over was financial.
Even to supply class of 30, even though we're a low-cost device,
every step is quite costly for some schools.
And we appreciate that.
But this is where I feel a stem club in a high school.
We get a lot of benefit over this.
They don't need to supply class of 30.
They can just get a few, and a few kings,
whether it be to build and use a low-inflation Mexico school.
And I truly believe that one Mexico school could give you
a year's worth of activities in a high school.
It's also very easy to take apart.
So future students could rebuild it again, no problem.
So it's one time investment for potentially,
it was 20 years of building.
Okay, so what were some of the outcomes of this workshop?
Well, each teacher left with the Mexico that they built.
We intend to follow up soon.
That's probably one of the first things I'll do when I'm backing those goals.
Send an email to them all, find out what they've been up to.
But they've actually already been in contact with me.
They've been asking about additional features that they would want.
They've been asking for just guidance on getting it set up in schools.
And I also sent my own feedback form to get as much information
out of them as I could.
But again, I don't want to take up more of their time of our
taking up a full day.
So I want to get the questions to minimum and as brief as possible.
Some of the questions I ask for things like,
how could you see yourself or others using the Mexico school
when you're school?
Is there anything we can do to make it more accessible to schools?
And we had two key pieces of feedback from this.
The first one being that during the workshop,
we got them to build our low-cost automated version.
So the stepper motors, it looks a lot like this one.
The front here, where you can automate imaging,
can automate scanning.
But actually what they said was a manual version
would be a lot more useful than a fashion.
Part of the science curriculum in high schools
has simple microscopy techniques like finding the focal point.
So the need to be able to adjust something and actually
bring the focus or bring the image into shortness.
And we actually have one.
If you haven't been to our table, come by later.
You can see our manual microscope.
But that also helps with the financial issue.
Our manual version costs 30 euros.
It's the cost of a large tech webcam.
And that's basically it.
The second feedback that we got was that the instructions
need to be tailored to be suitable for high school students.
I mentioned earlier that our instructors are very, very detailed.
And there's lots of pictures.
But actually what they said was,
I key our Lego style instructions
where they can just look at the pictures you can see everything
together would be much more accessible to high school students.
OK, so that's all I've got to say
but the high school side of things.
Let's move on to the other side of that spectrum.
Let's move on to the pathology education.
So one of the initiatives that the OpenFlexure Project
supports is the School of Open Pathology Education
or Scope.
Where the use the OpenFlexure Microsoft
for collaborative digital pathology education.
What this does is it allows privacy medics all
around the world to learn a local samples,
which is so, so important.
There's a lot of situations where pathologists are learning
from American textbooks or learning from pre-made samples
where it's not going to match what they're seeing
in their local area or in their local clinics.
On top of this, there will be a local clinic
where they get the sample, but then it's all fed upstream
to a centralized facility where they do all the analysis.
So it completely removes the local medics from the process
and they never get to learn or develop their skills
as a pathologist further.
There's also a worldwide shortage of trained pathologists
and by digitizing the education,
we can ease the strain on the privacy
and the training pathologists.
And similarly to what I said about high skills,
we can enable training that still low cost,
but it's still on cutting edge technology
that they would expect to find it any facility
around the world.
And it's locally manufactured and maintainable.
So it's something breaks.
They can fix it immediately.
If there was a part of the broke,
they can have it printed overnight and fixed in the morning.
And you're not forced to wait six months
for somebody to come out and fix it for them.
Or, and a lot of cases, that doesn't even happen.
About 70% of donating medical equipment
adds up ends up in landfill.
So what do you want any sessions involved?
So there's six-minute sessions.
And then the last semester or the first semester that we've had
a lot of the members are a lot of the attendees spoke Portuguese.
So we had real time Portuguese translation.
There's always time allowed for discussion and questions.
Each case study is made available before the session.
So everybody can look at it, come up with their own questions.
Oh, look at the group.
And the slides are available for afterwards for review as well.
At the first semester,
we had attendees from Kate Bird, Brazil, San Bia, United States,
and United Kingdom.
And the driving forces behind this are Dr. Daniel Rosen,
and Dr. Kelsey Hummel, who are global health specialists
and practicing pathologists in America.
And Dr. Drew Napper, who is at fullest in this year,
provides technical support for the medical school as well.
Okay, so what is next for the open-fletcher project and open education?
Well, for starters, we've established a UK-based charity called Humanitarian Technology Trust,
which is established to support open source local manufacturing around the world.
And part of this is ensuring proper documentation and resource for teachers.
And these resources are going to be developed in collaboration with teachers.
In fact, they must be good to develop and collaboration with teachers.
They're the ones that are going to use it.
We recently awarded £10,000 by the 1851 Royal Commission
to develop open curriculum-linked education resources based on the open-fletcher microscope.
So that's what folks are making resources that assist in integrating the Microsoft and the classroom.
This is going to include clear and age-appropriate assembly guides,
so I mentioned the Lego, the IKEA-style instructions.
It's also going to include less in-plans that teachers can use and are ready-made.
And then also classroom and outdoor activities for teachers to run.
This is a great start to my vision of a sort of library of less in-plans and activities
that teachers can continuously be adding to, they can download, they can change themselves, they can be upload,
it's exactly what opensource education should be.
And the final thing that I want to mention today, I said I was a PhD student.
I'm funded by the Royal Society.
And part of that is there's a Royal Society partnership ramp,
where you can partner between a university research group and a school.
And you can ate the aims to bring research a life in school.
So all the funding goes straight to the school and they can facilitate an entire research project.
Okay, so I hope I've demonstrated that there will be a pleasure in my school,
it was applicable in a broad range of educational settings.
These sources must be developed with teachers.
And when you're developing your hardware or software, whatever it is, you need to be adaptable.
Teachers are going to look at it and they're going to go,
yeah, that's really cool, but high tools kids are not going to, you know,
they're not going to interact with the way that you think you do.
So you need to be adaptable to that.
But digitizing educational pathology, we can bring down barriers and enable pathologists to use local samples,
which is so important to the development of pathologists around the world.
And the development of open educational resources will continue with the help of HDT and the 1851 Royal Commission.
Oh, so with that, I want to say thanks for listening.
And I want to say a special thanks to all my friends at University of Glasgow,
who drew free of birth, Walbert and Richard.
We've grown at University of Bath, who is a fantastic collaborator,
and Julian Sterling, who is the part of HDT.
And I also want to thank artists, components, who were keen enough to provide the funding to
fund the teacher workshop that I run.
So yeah, thanks for listening, and please come and chat to us at Table A.W.01.
Thank you.
Hi, guys.
Yes, hi.
Hi.
Have you been to the school schools?
Uh, in the end of the year?
When the school schools are, um, um, I've heard a few times.
Yeah, so the, the workshop that I run, it was five different teachers,
but it was also five different schools.
And so we've got five schools that definitely have open flesh and
make for schools.
Plus, there's, I know there's schools all around the world that have already started to,
to partner and make school without even, you know, pushing a, pushing a workshop at the
marathon with that.
And we're really hoping to, to get the word out.
I mean, contact with, um, the, uh, the sort of science teacher organization in Scotland,
um, who are going to help trying to get the open flesh and make some more teachers.
And I was probably just trying to answer.
Yes, we would love to have more, more teacher collaborators to give advice on how to,
how to get through to high school kids and what they would,
what teachers would need to, to do that.
Hi.
Thank you.
When will the other, of course, that you make one like it,
but reminding that the classroom will only pass a decent,
they wouldn't know for example.
Oh, he's sure, yes.
So, um, I mentioned the manual version, which is this one.
Uh, so that is the cost of a Logitech webcam.
So it's about 30 euros.
Um, and everything else is just not simple.
And there's an LED, which, uh, wouldn't cost too much.
For the version that I had the bills, uh, like these four here, um,
you're talking anywhere between 200 euros and 350 euros,
depending on what level of optics and what level of resolution you want.
Um, and comparison, um, if you compare that to the equipment that might appear in
clinics around the world, uh, what we do and what they do,
um, we're on part and imaging, not so much on speed,
but what we went on is cost.
So, like, there's 200 or 150 euros, uh, something that does the same,
the lowest cost is going to be about 35,000 euros.
Hi.
Uh, I'm objective.
Uh-huh.
On the back of your pieces of that thing, you think,
when you build them down, they're just...
No, so the, the lenses, when she buy them in bulk, they become really cheap.
Um, but the makes of rejectives are from places like Amazon and Ali express.
They cost about 30 euros as well.
Um, they're the cheapest that you can get.
Um, but we can still get a lot of them with, uh, like software and post processing.
Hello.
Hi.
Oh, great question.
So, uh, if you go on our website, open.org.
You'll find, uh, instructions on how to print and source all the parts to yourself.
Or, uh, we have a selection of vendors.
Uh, we have one per continent now, at least.
Um, where you can order the kit, or you can order, um,
just the electronics and the optics if you want to print all your own parts.
Um, but there are vendors who are ready to give you everything you need to build.
We'll be in the future.
Hi.
It's the, uh, design, uh, upgradable.
So if you start with point money, what can you do in the panning and the monitors and the electronics?
Oh, yeah, 100% yes. So, um, for example, uh, if you have the low cost optics version,
which just uses our Raspberry Pi camera instead of any sort of fancy,
make super creative.
It's a simple swapping at one part.
Um, when should have the other optics.
Um, it's just this sort of optics module in the middle that needs changed.
And that's it.
I think else is printed and designed to be properly aligned with each other already.
Hi.
Another one for cost of activity.
Is it effective this year?
But is there any plans for your settings to edit some questions?
Haha.
So, uh, we've, we can already do that.
Um, we have sort of, uh, additional modules that you can add to,
any of the different types of microscopes.
But yes, so fluorescence is one of them that you can do already.
Hi.
Do you have, um,
I don't know what's going on in there.
Uh, might be necessarily in school.
Hmm.
So, um, we actually have a form on our website as well.
Where people get in contact when they've, when they've built one,
when they've had problems with one to share what they're up to with it.
Um,
Yeah.
So they'll be the best place.
Uh, be the best place to see to community that we have.
Um,
most recently, somebody came into our form saying that they, um,
they're taking our microscope.
They're making a few alterations on their putting it in space,
which is very, very cool.
Um, so we're excited to see what that goes.
Uh, we don't have a call.
Well, we did a few years ago.
We had an open flasher call in, uh,
where we had everybody who was involved in a flasher come along.
I'm really hoping to do that again soon,
because it was, it was really, really good.
I, uh, both thank you everyone.
Uh, I think I'm about time.
So, thanks.
Thank you.