Bacteriophages, as the name “bacteria-eater” suggests, are viruses that infect bacteria. Bacteriophages, often abbreviated as “phages,” have receptors that bind to specific bacterial species, thus there are many types of bacteriophages. Once a phage interacts with its target bacterium, the phage injects its genetic material into the bacterial host where the phage is replicated to produce many new phages that then leave the host via cell lysis.

The night before I'm scheduled to volunteer on the Biobus, Dr. Ben Dubin-Thaler—the bus's owner and educational director—calls to give me directions: Take the 5 train to the Bronx, get off at the second-to-last stop. Make two rights and then a left on Baychester Avenue. Walk to John Philip Sousa Middle School. “We'll be parked out front,” Dubin-Thaler tells me. I hesitate, imagining picking my way through a sea of frenzied children and identical school buses. “You'll see us,” says Dubin-Thaler.

Every time I meet scientists, I like to ask what got them interested in their field. So far, of all the myriad reasons I have heard, not one has said “I always enjoyed doing problems and answering multiple choice questions.”

MICRO, an acronym for Microscopy In Curriculum—Research Outreach, is the outreach program for middle schools sponsored by the Microscopy Society of America (MSA). Middle schools are the battleground for minds of young people because this is an important time for students to make decisions about whether to take science classes in high school. Unfortunately, the majority of middle school teachers are not adequately prepared to teach science; therefore, additional exposure to science may encourage students' interest.

Over the past decade numerous institutions have developed programs geared toward providing scanning electron microscopy capabilities for use by teachers and educators in K–12 classrooms. Perhaps the longest continually running outreach effort began at Iowa State University in the mid-1990s. Termed Project ExCEL, the Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning, this effort employs a web-operable SEM, termed the WebSEM, which was developed in cooperation with RJ Lee Group. Lessons have been conducted in a number of states around the U.S., as well as several international locations. Several other sites also exist; perhaps the most successful at maintaining a steady user base and marketing itself is Bugscope at the University of Illinois. A summary and listing of other sites most easily found by a simple web search is included in reference.

Internationally, United States fifteen-year-olds scored 24th in science literacy and 28th in mathematics according to the Congressional Research Service March 2008 report.

NanoGrande is the culmination of an art-science effort that brought undergraduate students and faculty from science, engineering, and the visual arts together with professional microscopists of the Capital District Microscopy and Microanalysis Society for electron microscopy education and outreach. Students from two independent undergraduate courses, an advanced photography course and a microscopy laboratory course, collaborated on the project. The participants represented a wide range of majors, including chemistry, biology, electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, bioengineering, psychology, neuroscience, sociology/social sciences, history, and the visual arts. Emphasis was placed on both the scientific and the artistic aspects of the imaging process. The creation of electron microscopy images that were at the same time scientifically meaningful and visually compelling depended critically on communication of insights and ideas between paired students. The collaboration generated an art-science exhibition, NanoGrande, that has been presented to over four-thousand K through 12 students.

The Physics and Astronomy Department of Appalachian State University acquired a Nanosurf Easyscan 2 system in the Fall of 2008 with funds from an NSF MRI award (DMR 0821124). We have used this AFM in over a dozen outreach activities for middle and high school students. We also have incorporated the AFM into several of our college courses, including an overview course on microscopy, a first-year seminar course on nanotechnology, and a senior-level lab course for physics students. We have learned from our outreach and teaching experience that introducing AFM to students excites them about nanoscience and nanotechnology and provides an important opportunity for implementing experiential learning in the classroom. Several principles are reinforced by having the students learn to operate the microscope and acquire images themselves. When students take ownership of acquiring AFM data during sample analysis and are able to take with them a digital file or print out the imaging results, it allows them to share what they learned with their peers and family. This learning cycle, from abstract conceptualization to concrete experience, has proven to be an effective pedagogy for students of all ages. To improve our outreach and teaching activities, we have developed several new learning modules for AFM, and we share one physics-based module here.

In the last decade, microscopy has been successfully employed by a number of research groups as a means of instilling enthusiasm for science and technology into students of all ages, especially school children . Remote microscopy (or telemicroscopy) and virtual microscopy (in the form of software simulators) continue to play important roles in these efforts and also in the teaching and training of new microscopists . Such work and associated electronic teaching resources have become prominent features of conferences such as Microscopy & Microanalysis.

Bugscope is a free online microscopy outreach program that offers K–12 classrooms anywhere in the world the ability to remotely operate a high-resolution scanning electron microscope, collect images of insects and other similar arthropods, and chat simultaneously with a team of scientists. It was conceived and implemented in the late 1990s when K–12 schools were beginning to gain broadband Internet access, many as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. One of several projects that took advantage of this opportunity to use the Internet to bring the laboratory into the classroom, Bugscope began as an NSF grant to purchase a field-emission scanning electron microscope and develop sophisticated client and server software to control it via a standard web browser. Inspired by the success of and lessons learned from the Chickscope remote magnetic resonance imaging project and from having successfully established remote web-based control of a transmission electron microscope, Clint Potter and Bridget Carragher created the Bugscope project with the goal of developing a remote microscopy educational outreach project that would be sustainable over the long term. This goal led to two significant design decisions. First, the software involved in setting up and running the live outreach sessions was purpose-built to ensure that only one staff member, if necessary, would be required at the instrument (as opposed to Chickscope, which required staff at the remote location as well as at the instrument). Second, students from a local high school would be employed as a renewable resource to help with pre-session sample preparation and to participate in live chat, answering questions from the remote classrooms. Although we now operate with permanent staff at the instrument, these efficiencies in the original concept/design have allowed Bugscope to operate continuously since March 1999, long after the original funding was exhausted.