A good place to start a microworld class is with the “father of microbiology”, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, who lived 300 years ago in the golden age of Dutch science and technology. Antonie made and used microscopes to study the quality of the threads in his draper business. But one day, he turned his microscope away from the threads toward the environment around him. He saw small animals in drops of water and cells in plants. He drew and published drawings of them, and the science of microbiology started. His microscope had the power of a toy microscope of today. This class will retrace some of the paths he took into the microworld.