It gave the students a basic look at a real phenomenon of nature and caused them to question what it was or for what it was used. The WWL provides control of scientific imaging instruments using the Internet. The WWL approach has three advantages. First, it provides researchers at all levels from any place and at any time access to the latest scientific instruments without having to travel or invest in such hardware. Second, it provides researchers with an opportunity for collaboration and consultation with other researchers anywhere in the world, thus creating a network of distributed expertise.
Classrooms supply their insect specimens in advance.
The specimens are then prepared and inserted into the microscope by the project's operations team, comprised primarily of high school and undergraduate students, who are assisted by a professional electron microscopist. Each classroom is initially allowed a single opportunity to access the microscope from their school computers at a pre-arranged date and time. The primary goal of Bugscope is to demonstrate that relatively low cost, sustainable access to the microscope can be made available to K-12 classrooms nationwide, at a rate of 100 classrooms per year, using less than three hours of instrument time per week, and using minimal staff resources. Bugscope home page. This paper provides an overview and a formative evaluation of the project to assess its ongoing activities.