The Bugscope staff. Left to right: Chas Conway, Cate Wallace, Alex Lazarevich, Umesh Thakkar, Scott Robinson, and Annie Ray.
“I had heard that some mythical program existed over at Beckman from some members of my department,” Ray said. “So I came over to look at some of the insects I work on and then I got to know some of the people down in the Microscopy Suite. I just wanted to help out however I could because I thought it was a really great program and a great opportunity, and they needed an entomologist too.
“I said ‘do you need somebody to help out with Bugscope’ and they were like ‘yeah, sure, log in if you want.’ It just worked out. Our personalities meshed. The rapport that we have in a session is really good.”
The Bugscope sessions can get pretty charged sometimes.
“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.”
The chat is designed so the BugOps can highlight a question they want to answer in pink. Students are color-coded in blue and teachers in red in the chat window, while the Adminz, as the BugOps are called, are in green. Each session is archived with transcripts and images of the chat as it took place. Teachers may return to the Bugscope Web site to use their session over and over. The students and teachers’ names are kept anonymous.
Robinson said there have been more than 420 Bugscope sessions with more than 250 classrooms taking part since 1999. He said the most common question they get from the students is: “What do those hairs do? Annie Ray actually wrote a paper called ‘What do those hairs do?’”
So what do those bug hairs do?
“They are the means that the insects have for assessing their environment,” Robinson said. “They are purely sensory. They could be thermal receptors for hot or cold, or they could be detectors for pheromones, some multi-chemo sensor. All these things we see we don’t always realize what they are.”
The Bugscope project has undergone changes over the years as far as technology development and growing to include classrooms from all over the world. But the basic mission has remained the same: show students that science can be exciting as well as educational, and that even scientists can have fun.
“We want them to have a great experience, we want them to see something that they have never seen before or had the ability to do before,” Robinson said. “We want them to understand that they are actually driving this $600,000 microscope and that these aren’t just canned images. We want the kids to just have an awesome time.