A screen capture from a live Bugscope session.
Halfway through a recent session, the “driver” at the school who was in charge of guiding the SEM moved it out of range of the on-screen sample.
Cate: Whoops, the end of the world. (:
Robinson leapt out of his chair and sprinted from his office across the hall to the Beckman basement room housing the SEM, and manually reset the microscope. Soon the students and teachers were looking at an image of a wasp’s eye rendered with amazing clarity and detail. A question was asked about whether each of the little lens squares they were seeing that make up the eye are actually individual eyes.
Scot: each is a separate ‘lens’
Scot: you can see that there are many hundreds to thousands of individual facets, individual ommatidia
Cate: there are still some mysteries as to what the compound eye sees, most think that each lens will see a part of the “picture” and relay each part back to the brain where it is put together
Later in the session Ray, a Ph.D. candidate in entomology at Illinois, responds to a question from the third grade class asking if all insects have a thorax.
Annie: All insects have head, thorax and abdomen. All insects have six legs and one pair of antennae. Those are the requirements for being an insect!
A couple of minutes later time is up for this session of Bugscope and all parties say goodbye, thanks, and then sign off.
According to the Bugscope Web site, “Bugscope allows teachers everywhere to provide students with the opportunity to become microscopists themselves – the kids propose experiments, explore insect specimens at high-magnification, and discuss what they see with our scientists – all from a regular web browser over a standard broadband internet connection.”
Teachers make an application for their classes to take part in a Bugscope session, with some classes sending in samples of bugs and other items they have scavenged from their homes, yards, and elsewhere, or they may see samples provided by the BugOps and others.
Not all of the samples are of insects. A growth of coral was sent in from one classroom, while the BugOps like putting a sample of anti-caking salt from Wendy’s in the SEM because, Robinson said, “it looks like an Aztec carving instead of a boring cube.”