Educational Outreach Program Still Going Strong after 10 years

A Bugscope session is entertaining, educational, often amazing, sometimes frustrating for the adults, and always fascinating. In short, a Bugscope session is much like any one of the thousands of schoolchildren who have taken part in the unique Beckman Institute educational outreach program.

For a decade now, Bugscope has literally handed the keys to a powerful, research university-level microscope to thousands of K through 12 students from all over the world. Using Web browsers on their school computers, students can remotely control the scanning electron microscope (SEM) operated by Beckman’s Imaging Technology Group (ITG), ask questions of ITG staff members via a chat window, and enter a microscopic world usually seen only by trained scientists.

Begun in March of 1999 with a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Bugscope is celebrating 10 years of bringing – free of charge – the power of remote access microscopy to school classrooms in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Ten years after its first session, Bugscope is still wowing children and their teachers with two nanometer-scale resolution of an awe-inspiring world of wasp’s eyes, spider’s claws, and many more sights that the vast majority of these students would otherwise never encounter.

According to Scott Robinson, manager of ITG’s Microscopy Suite where the SEM is housed, “every Bugscope session is a little bit different” – just like the kids who take part in the sessions on an almost daily basis during the school months.

Turning the controls of a scanning electron microscope over to schoolchildren can make for a ride that is sometimes a little wild and bumpy, but almost always fun, and always educational. Logging in to a recent Bugscope session is all it takes to realize that, as Robinson and fellow ITG staffers Cate Wallace, Chas Conway, and Alex Lazarevich, as well as entomologist-in-residence Annie Ray, answer questions from their individual computer stations.

Student: wow! thats soo awesome! it really zooms in!
Student: what is this thing???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Scot: weevil...
Scot: this is one of the weevils you guys sent
Student: what is a weavel???????
Annie: a weevil is a beetle in the family curculionidae. They are the most diverse group of insects on the planet!
Student: do you have fun looking at the bugs
Student: wooowww!
Annie: Yes, it is fun to look at insects
Student: It looks dead
Cate: all the insects we put in the microscope are dead. If they weren’t they would be too juicy for the microscope to pump down to a vacuum state, and they would also die because of the lack of air...

And if the students start to lose interest, the Bug Operators, or BugOps as the Bugscope team members are called, know just what to do. 

“If someone says that he or she is bored we may give that person control of the microscope, assign some responsibility to that person,” Robinson said. “What’s really cool is that often that person will rise to the occasion. All of a sudden the dynamic changes because then all of the kids want to drive the microscope.”

Student 8: put 8 in control
Student 8: put 8 in control...
Student: It is fun to control
Student: do you have fun lokking at bugs
alex: oh yeah, this is a blast, we love doing bugscope...
Student 15: can 15 be in controll
Student 9: thanx i am now in control!!