Students gain access to electron microscope via Internet
Published: Monday, Aug. 1, 2011 – 12:00 am | Page 3B The Sacramento Bee
Scott Robinson looks for the grossest, creepiest things, like stingers, fangs, and venom pores. Spider eyes are creepy at 300- to 20,000-fold magnification. And kids love creepy.
Robinson is a microscopist with a program known as Bugscope that puts a $600,000 electron microscope under the control of K-12 kids all over the country, via the Internet. The program last week received a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE).
In an essay in Friday’s edition of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bugscope collaborators Michele Korb and Umesh Thakkar explained how the program works.
It is free to schools, home-school networks and museums, and uses a scanning electron microscope at Beckman Imaging Technology Group at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schools in Davis, Turlock and the Bay Area have used the program.
What’s special, Korb said in an interview, “is that it’s a live session. You send your insects. You have direct interaction with scientists at Illinois. It’s a live chat,” with students controlling the scope and the direction of the conversation.
Korb teaches Bugscope to future science teachers as a professor at California State University, East Bay.
She said Bugscope allows as many kids to log on as there are laptops in a classroom.
“We did it with 75 second-graders once in Wisconsin,” Korb said.
Beckman purchased the microscope with help from National Science Foundation funds designated for K-12 education. Bugscope uses it for about four to six hours a week; the rest of the time it is available for research.
“The whole idea is allowing a classroom to be like research investigators,” Thakkar said. “Each session is unique. The teacher has the power. The kids are the main actors. We are just support.”
To take Bugscope beyond fun and help students learn important ideas in science will require creative thinking by teachers, said Rich Hedman, director of the Center for Mathematics and Science Education at California State University, Sacramento. But he thinks Bugscope offers wide opportunities for science teachers and students.
Credit: Bugscope, Imaging Technology Group, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
Atta cephalotes up close: A leafcutter ant soldier, its alien surface contours picked out by the electron beam of Bugscope’s environmental scanning electron microscope. The width of the field is about 2 millimeters. The ESEM is capable of resolving features as close as 2 nanometers. (about the width of the DNA double helix). Workers have large serrated jaws. Leafcutters do not eat leaves. They cultivate fugus, carrying leave pieces home to the hive to feed their fungal farms.
- http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/ The homepage for Bugscope, a program that helps K-12 kids drive an electron microscope remotely, from computers in their home schools. The program won an award for online science educational tools, which will be announced in the journal Science tomorrow.
- http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/spore/ A list of the (free and open to the public) websites of the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) winners, including a periodic table of youtube videos, an arctic-literacy project “beyond penguins and polar bears,” and The Universe Online.
- http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/members/2011-060/ An archived session from Grayslake Middle School, quoted in the story, demonstrates some of the strengths and weakness of the program. And has some nice pictures.
- http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/archives.php The portal to the archives has a Google map showing the locations of over 400 participating schools
OUTTAKES
“It’s just really cool to see these kids who won’t do anything really take ownership,” said Nicole Schneider, a language arts teacher at Grayslake Middle school in Illinois. Schneider likes to include science in the summer school curriculum for students that have failed a grade during the regular school year.
Summer students do not bring much enthusiasm to class. Much of the time “it feels like I’m pulling tricks out of a hat to keep their attention.” She said having the Beckman scientists on live chat is essential because science is not her area of expertise. But driving the microscope is “very easy. It’s like navigating any website. You click a button and zoom an image. Click a button and it goes to different part of the bug. It’s idiot-proof.”
“It was a very smooth process from start to finish,” said Joe Finn, Jr., who teaches science as part of his 6th grade curriculum at Horizon Middle Elementary in Pewaukee, WI. Both teachers said the kids brought their new bug intelligence into writing and art projects, though the bug inspiration did not necessarily carry over into further science interests for most students.
Inspiration and ease of use were big goals for Thakkar, a research scientist in education and information technology at UI, and now a policy fellow putting his experience in computer interfacing to work at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC. He began work on the program in 1999, building on his experience with Chickscope, which followed the development of chicken embryos by MRI.
“But the MRI, as you probably guessed, is a very expensive instrument,” said Thakkar. Doctors told him “we can’t have you guys running around with kids using the MRI all day,” so Thakkar looked for a more sustainable system that would be fun for kids, and accessible remotely.
“How do you create an interface that can appeal to a second grader, a sixth grader, a twelfth grader?” He asked. You keep it simple. “You don’t want to confuse the user, and more importantly you don’t want to waste the instrument time.”
Beckman purchased the electron microscope with help from National Science Foundation funds designated for K-12 education. Bugscope uses it for about 4-6 hours per week, and the rest of the time it is available for research on bendable silicon, self-healing paint and plastics, drug delivery systems, and the shapes of bacteria.
“The whole idea is allowing a classroom to be like research investigators,” said Thakkar. “Each session is unique. The teacher has the power. The kids are the main actors. We are just support.” Students and teachers get out the program what they bring to it. “If they want to make the session successful, it’s up to them.”
Rich Hedman, director of the Center for Mathematics and Science Education at Sacramento State thinks Bugscope looks like a great opportunity for teachers and students, “but it will take some creative thinking and planning time by the teacher to ensure that using the Bugscope is not just “fun” but allows students to deepen their understanding of an important idea (or two) in science,” he wrote, by email.
“Pure inquiry lessons are purely student-driven, and as you might imagine, this can have very positive results (students can get very engaged in their work, etc.), and very negative results (students investigating things with little connection to important science ideas and/or the state science content standards).“
With savvy teacher guidance, Bugscope provides broad scope for youthful investigations into the tiny world of insects and the big world of science.
Excellent explanation of NGO and what it means to the beneficiaries, the community, and the public. Being employed by a bureaucracy for 25 years, the nothing is simple’ concept is completely understood. Keep up the good work.