Microscope Imaging Station

The Microscope Imaging Station is a section of the Exploratorium Museum where museum visitors can use research-grade microscopes to look up close at life. The Imaging Station has featured real live stem cells, developing zebrafish, growing frog eggs and more. This project was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The website makes publicly available large images and high quality videos.

In 2008, the site was nominated for a Webby in the category of Science.

This site was built in 3 iterations over the course of several years. I worked on the 2nd and 3rd iteration.

For this site, I worked on developing the design (which matched elements of the physical exhibit), architecture, web media specs and created a simple php/mysql database to help categorize the multimedia. I also consulted with teachers who would be using certain learning activities in their classrooms. This was how we determined the best multimedia for the teachers - as the classroom realities of computers are not always the highest quality.

One cool feature, which was an enormous nightmare to build, was the 'scale' feature. This was very important for teachers, to be able to share the scale of the images with students. However, when you make images from microscopes, the zooming effects the scale. And then when you adapt these images to the web, the scale can change again. We basically restored the scale to all the images. This wasn't pretty, but we suffered through it for the sake of biology education.

Stem cells

It was quite exciting to work on the Stem Cell features. Scientists would regularly visit to meet with us, and we had the opportunity to meet with stem cell researchers. The microscopist Kristina Yu learned how to grow stem cells. The stem cells need to be grown in a sterile & warm environment. There is a special solution that is necessary to feed the stem cells. They put the little cells in a drop of liquid on a slide and invert it. The cells clump together at the bottom of the drop of liquid.

Here are some screenshots: