Patricia Forbes

Speccing Up Education

There’s nothing quite like students to push even the most rugged instrument to breaking point. But regardless of their talent for destruction, the next generation of scientists need to learn how to use their instrumentation effectively if they are to avoid becoming “button pushers” in the future. Here we introduce two low-cost – and hardy - solutions: one, an easy-to-assemble spectrophotometer that is helping students look “beyond the box”; the other, a compact instrument that aims to democratize Raman spectroscopy.