Ray said she brings in “mosquitoes, abandoned specimens from my department, glowworms which are actually beetles, owl flies, lice, bed bugs, ticks,” and some bugs that, she added with a laugh, “I collect off of myself.”
Prior to each session the samples are prepared using a gold-palladium coating, the samples are placed in the SEM, images of some samples are pre-set for quick reference, and once the class logs in, the fun begins.
The teachers and/or students are in charge of navigating, focusing, magnifying, and other controls of the SEM, while they interact with the BugOps via a chat window that is just below whatever image the SEM is focusing on at the moment. A Bugscope session may have the teachers relaying the questions and doing all the driving or – and this, the BugOps say, is the most fun – it may feature the students doing the driving and asking the questions themselves.
“It’s very energizing. You’ll have three or four people responding and everyone is trying to answer these questions as soon as they come up,” Ray said. “It’s think on your feet, rapid-fire questioning. We have developed this thing of knowing who is going to answer what question.”
— Annie Ray
Ray usually takes part in Bugscope sessions from her lab in Morrill Hall or at her apartment. Other BugOps like Robinson, Wallace, and Conway usually join in from their respective offices, while Lazarevich is usually handling things in the room housing the SEM and its operating computers. While the BugOps sit at their computers, students and their teachers in places like Illinois and Hawaii and Spain fire questions at them, while they race to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible.
Robinson said their approach to students is to let them learn by doing.
“We don’t go in and say now we are going to teach you about silkworms. That would be trying to frame the discussions for the students,” he said. “We don’t want to be talking down to the students. The idea of having chat lines and not dictating to the students is that it brings the students in where they are participating and it’s democratic; they can talk and we can talk.”
There is a rapport between the BugOps that has been ongoing since Robinson and former full-time ITG staff member Daniel Weber worked on the original Bugscope sessions.
“We had a friendly competition, joking around and trying to answer questions faster and more completely,” he said. “Daniel is good-natured and I just went along with Daniel. The kids could see that we were having fun.”
Robinson said being a good BugOp requires certain qualities. “You want to have good people skills and you have to be patient.”
Ray, who will get her Ph.D. in entomology in May, is the only long-term, trained entomologist Bugscope has ever had.