Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Bugscope session: Wow!

Today we had our last day of co-op. I taught Hands-on Science to a group of ten 6 to 8 year olds that finished up with our live Bugscope session!

The details to reserve time on the scanning electron microscope are at the website. We collected bug and mailed them out last week. The folks at Bugscope (I believe they are grad students studying various small arthropods) mount them and are then available for live chat during the session. You can have up to 20 computers logged in; we had 4. Below are some of the images we were able to manipulate--center, zoom, focus--from our computers.


While only one computer at a time has control, you can type questions from any of them. The grad students were great! And this fidgety class of rambunctious kids were fascinated for the full hour that we had reserved. They seemed to love it more than the older kids that wandered in late in the session.

This is something our co-op will certainly do again next year!

4 comments:

Dana Leeds said...

Wow!!! That's INCREDIBLE!Thanks for sharing.:-)

L a u r a said...

This is WONDERFUL!! The Virtual Microscope is as well!

This reminds me that there's a scanning electron microscope where my husband works. Hmmmm... Since it's primarily used by a geologist, we may not get much bug scoping with him, but...

Once again, thank you for the fantastic resource.

Jessica said...

This is amazing. What a great opportunity for the kids. Thanks for sharing.

Kris said...

Laura, maybe your husband could set up a Rockscope program--I'll sign up!