The lab was open on Thursday and Friday last week with lots of experimental activities exploring, in disgusting detail, the science behind hand washing. The activities helped the children at GOSH to understand how microbiologists study the invisible 'germs' or 'microorganisms' on our hands.
How can we see them if they are invisible?
Before entering the lab the children were asked 'What do you use your hands for?' and 'Why do you wash your hands?'. There were lots of very thoughtful responses.
We use our hands for: 'Greeting people, waving hello and goodbye' 'Touching, feeling and investigating' 'Picking things up' 'Eating' 'Playing' 'Writing' 'Drawing' 'To ring the bell' 'Clapping (having fun)' 'Drinking' 'Brushing teeth' 'Painting' 'Turn on taps' 'Holding things and feeling things' 'make stuff' 'Scratching your nose' 'Sticking' 'Eating sweets' 'Washing stuff up' 'Colouring' and of course....'Holding slugs'!!
We wash our hands to: 'Get rid of the dirt' 'To keep them clean so that we don't get infections' 'So we don't get germs on them' 'So bacteria does not spread' 'Stay clean and fight germs' 'To keep clean and to stop germs from going into your body' 'To keep you healthy' 'In case you get ill' 'We have to wash our hands so we do not get them dirty' 'We wash our hands because there are always germs on our hands and if we don't wash them more and more germs get on to your hands'
We were extremely lucky to have a professional microscopist (try saying this word out loud!) with us in the Hands On Activity Lab. Dennis Fulwood is a member of The Quekett Microscopical Club, he is passionate about microscopy and loves nothing more than meeting young enthusiasts.
Dennis brought in his microscope and lots of intriguing slides of spiders, fossils and even a piece of meteorite. The children were queuing up to have a look at their hands under a microscope and see if they could see anything lurking about there in the unknown. It was fascinating to be able to see such tiny things on an enormous scale!
So we can look at very very tiny things under a microscope to see them in more detail, but we can't quite see any microorganisms under the microscope....they are still too tiny. Before microbiologists examine different types of microorganisms, they have to let them grow, multiply and develop into colonies (groups of microbes). When lots of tiny microorganisms are grouped together they are much easier to see and identify. In these dishes you can see different types of microorganisms that have been grown in the lab.
We wanted to see what it was like collecting and cultivating microorganisms, so we had a go. We collected a sample of microorganisms from somewhere on our person. We used a 'swab', which is like a giant cotton bud, to take our sample.
Some people put the swab up their nose, in their ear, in their arm pits and even in their mouth. Our microorganisms were too small to be seen on our swab, we had to use a special technique in our lab to make our microorganisms or 'germs' bigger and visible.
Microbiologists use a special jelly-like substance called 'agar' to help the microorganisms they collect grow. There are different types of agar which provide environments for the various types of microorganisms to develop. They come in lots of pretty colours, you can even get chocolate agar! When the samples microbiologists take are spread onto the agar, the agar plates are then left in a warm environment (about the same temperature as our body) for a couple of days in order to grow.
Here is some agar before and after this process:
We had a go at spreading out our sample on to agar plates that were kindly donated to us by Cherwell Laboratories who supply labs all over the country.
Microbiologists spread their samples onto their plates in a very specific way. Because the sample we have taken contains so many different types of microorganisms, hundreds and hundreds in fact, it is important to separate these into their individual groups, otherwise it is hard to tell one microorganism from another. It looks like this:
Because most of the young people couldn't come back to see how their agar plates had developed in a warm place for a couple of days, we used a very 'special scientific solution' to speed up the process and help us to visualise how our microorganisms would look like if we grew them.
This is what the agar plates looked like after a few days.
Have a look at 'Workshop Eight!' for more of the things that we got up to last week...............
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