If you can’t afford a microscope, make one out of paper.

Manu Prakash was born in Meerut, India. They had little money, so when he was about six, he ‘borrowed’ his brother’s spectacles, found a cardboard tube, something like a Pringles carton, and taped one spectacle lens on one side, and the other lens on the other side, to build his first microscope.

It didn’t work, and he broke his brother’s glasses and got into a lot of trouble. But it set him on his path to create Frugal Science. Which Manu is using to take science where it has never been able to go to before.

At Design Indaba 2020 he spoke about the DIY foldable paper microscope he invented, then later held a workshop where we could make our own.

Yeah baby, did we nerd out, or did we nerd out?

It comes in this kit:

It’s like a paper doll kit. You press out the parts from a sheet of paper card. It has lego-type instructions, and takes about 20 minutes to build you own Foldscope:

Foldable DIY paper Foldscope

It’s 97% paper, AND can attach to your phone for even more fun with microscopic stuff. It magnifies 140 times. We plucked out our eyebrows (mine are apparently oddly pointy) and examined our skin cells and anything else we could get our hands on.

Beach sand

Up close and personal with a dragonfly wing

This is Jack McCormack (12), who was at the workshop and created the above images. In his own homage to Frugal Science, he turned an old piece of foam into his slide and specimen collecting thingamajig.

So that’s Foldscopes in a very tiny nutshell. Ooh nutshells, wonder what they’d look like under a microscope?

Each Foldscope has a unique ID number, which you can log on the website and share the kinds of things you’re exploring and discovering and see what everyone else around the world is looking at. This is science made possible for all.

DI talk doodle by Karin Barry McCormack