BIO233 Lab, microscope and scale of microbial world,

There is another class before BIO233L, which left me only 10 minutes to prepare the microbe lab. 

Use youtube tutorial for microscope usage.

Many students chose to work as group, even though I emphasized that microscope practical test require independent effort.

Problems that students had during the lab: Some used 4x objective to identify bacterial cell shape. Some mistook dye debris for cells.  Pink can be mistaken as purple. Because of fission growth, bacillus tend to form long stretch of line.  These lines were mistaken as spirillum.

In the future, I should spent more time on  Proscope demo show students what cocci, rod, and spirillum cells look like.  One problem is that most students could not wait to get their hands on the microscope before I even finished the demo. I probably can ask student volunteer to demonstrate the different shapes of bacteria.
 
One problem is that 'purple' comes out as 'pink' in Proscope images.  Another faculty told me that I should be able to adjust the 'filter' parameter in ProscopHR software to tweak the color of the images.

For the calculation exercises from the scale of microbial world, many students do not know what numbers go to numerator or denominator.