Gizmos Student Exploration| Cell Types Answer Key| Grade A+

Gizmo Student Exploration: Cell Types Name:

Vocabulary: ATP, bacteria, carbon dioxide (CO2), cell, cellular respiration, compound light microscope, eukaryote,
multicellular, muscle cell, neuron, organelle, photosynthesis, prokaryote, protist, red blood cell, root hair cell, tissue,
unicellular, white blood cell

Prior Knowledge Questions (Do these BEFORE using the Gizmo.)

1. How do you know if something is alive? Describe some of the characteristics of living things.

You know if something is alive if it has cells or DNA


2. Humans, plants and mushrooms are all alive. What do these organisms have in common?

They each have cells or DNA


Gizmo Warm-up
In the Cell Types Gizmo, you will use a light microscope to compare and contrast different
samples. On the LANDSCAPE tab, click on the Elodea leaf. (Turn on Show all samples if you
can’t find it.) Switch to the MICROSCOPE tab to observe the sample as it would appear under
the microscope. By default, this microscope is using 40x magnification.

1. Drag the Coarse focus slider until the sample is focused as well as possible. Then,

improve the focus with the Fine focus slider. What do you see?I believe that I see the the

skin of the elodea leaf




2. Select the 400x magnification. If necessary, adjust the fine focus. Now, what do you see?

After the 400x magnification, I believe that I see the cells of the leaf.
3.




The individual chambers you see are cells, the smallest functional unit of an organism.

, Get the Gizmo ready:
Activity A: Observing On the LANDSCAPE tab, click on the woman’s right arm to choose the Human
cells skin sample.
Select the MICROSCOPE tab.

Introduction: Complex organisms are made up of smaller units, called cells. Most cells are too small to be seen by the
naked eye. Microscopes are used to magnify small objects, so here you will use a compound light microscope to observe
the cells of different organisms.

Question: What are similarities and differences between cells from different organisms?

1. Match: Read about each microscope part. Match the description to
the part on the diagram.

B Stage: Platform where a slide is placed.

A Eye piece: Lens at the top of the microscope that the user looks
though. This lens most commonly magnifies a sample by 10x.

C Coarse focus knob: Large knob that moves the stage up and down
to focus the sample.
D
Fine focus knob: Small knob that moves the stage over a
short distance to refine the focus.

E Objective lens: A second lens that further magnifies the sample.
Microscopes usually have several objective lenses with different
magnifications. The total magnification is the product of the eyepiece
magnification and the objective lens magnification.

F Slide: A rectangular piece of glass upon which a sample is mounted
for viewing under a microscope.


2. Manipulate: With 40x selected, use the Coarse and Fine focus sliders to focus on the sample. Then, choose 400x
and focus on the sample using the Fine focus slider.

A. Which focus knob is easier to use at 40x? coarse focus 400x? fine focus

B. Turn on Show labels. What structures can you see in human skin cells?

I see nucleus, cytoplasm, and a cell membrane


C. Turn off Show labels and turn on Show scale bars. The scale bar has a width of 20 micrometers, or 20
μm. (There are 1,000 micrometers in a millimeter.)

Using the scale bar, about how wide is a human skin cell? About 40 um