image: This is a microscopy suite. The microscope is used by remote classrooms as well as by Beckman research scientists. view more
Credit: Image © <i>Science</i>/AAAS
An online project that puts access to an extremely powerful electron microscope into the hands of students all over the country has been selected by the journal Science to win the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) award.
"We're hopeful that this award will help provide a model for other, similar efforts to incorporate scientists' technologies into teaching and learning via the Web," says Umesh Thakkar, one of the developers of the project, which is operated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Called Bugscope, the project allows students to explore their own bug samples magnified 20,000 times. "Bugscope uses the Web as a laboratory, so students and teachers can do their own scientific investigations."
Science magazine developed the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) to promote the best online materials in science education. The acronym SPORE suggests a reproductive element adapted to develop, often in less-than-ideal conditions, into something new. In a similar way, these winning projects can be seen as the seeds of progress in science education, despite considerable challenges to educational innovation. Each month, Science publishes an article by a recipient of the award, which explains the winning project. The article about Bugscope will be published on July 29.
"Improving science education is an important goal for all of us at Science," says editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts. "We hope to help those innovators who have developed outstanding online resources reach a wider audience. Each winning Web site will be featured in an article in Science that is aimed at guiding science educators from around the world to valuable free online resources."
In the late 1990s, Thakkar, who earned a PhD in instructional design and technology at Ohio State University, became interested in conducting classroom investigations on the Web by remotely controlling state-of-the-art scientific equipment. The first project he became involved in was called Chickscope, which allowed students to interactively explore the development of chick embryos. That project also involved Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur, whose work had led to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Use of MRI in Chickscope, however, ultimately required too much staffing and expense to be considered sustainable.
Thakkar then collaborated with scientist Clint Potter, who had begun work on Bugscope, which was deemed sustainable for use in classrooms from kindergarten to high school, and even at the college level.
Besides its sustainability, Bugscope had another appealing feature. Its area of scientific exploration is, of course, bugs, and the electron microscope blows them up to "creature feature" levels of magnification in a way that is irresistible to most kids.
"Bugscope connects with aspiring young scientists by relating to their fascination with bugs," says Melissa McCartney, an editorial fellow at Science. "Observing the intricate detail of the specimens they submit at such a high magnification allows students to see firsthand how these creatures breathe, eat, and move.
"Teachers report that one session of Bugscope is enough to turn a student with an aversion to science into one who wonders how soon they can collect more specimens for inspection."
The process for gaining access to Bugscope, which is completely free of charge, is intentionally quick and straightforward. The application takes less than ten minutes. Each classroom proposes its own project, using its own samples, and the teacher simply provides a brief description of what the students would like to do. Once the process is completed, the class has remote control of a scientific instrument that costs more than $500,000.
"The goal is to treat the teacher, and the students through the teacher, as a scientific investigator" says Thakkar.
Like in a real-life laboratory, scientists such as entomologists or microscopists are available to the student "investigators" during the real-time session with the microscope. The students direct the inquiry with their own questions. "Why are there 'hairs' on the insect?," one might ask.
"When the students look at the insects' feature up close, they get so excited," says Michele Korb, co-author of the SPORE essay. Korb has a PhD in science education from Marquette University and has been working with Thakkar for ten years to bring Bugscope to teachers in training. "I think it's important for students to ask and answer their own questions. Usually, they're asked to answer someone else's."
"With Bugscope, they don't listen passively," says Thakkar. "They drive the experience."
The idea of course is to provide a system of active learning and actual scientific inquiry, rather than filling students with facts and vocabulary. Thakkar and Korb refer to an effort in education to help students learn to gather and interpret their own scientific evidence and participate in scientific discourse. This is seen as a way to foster a better understanding of science generally, as well as to captivate future scientists and science educators. During the live sessions, the students often ask how they can prepare themselves to become scientists.
So far, more than 580 classrooms in 415 schools have used Bugscope, and students and teachers have acquired more than 120,000 images of bugs. The classrooms that have participated have been all over the country, from the inner city to remote rural schools, even in home schools.
Bugscope is one of the best examples of bringing real scientific technologies to the classroom in a truly meaningful way, says Korb. She adds that the system is practical for teachers, because it is easily and quickly accessed, yet the level of investigation it provides is very sophisticated.
"Every time I do this with kids in classrooms, the excitement is palpable," she says.
To visit Bugscope, go to http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu, or for more information on the use of Bugscope in teacher preparation programs, go to http://michelekorbbugscope.wordpress.com/.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine (www.sciencetranslationalmedicine.org) and Science Signaling (www.sciencesignaling.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.