Bugscope: a Sustainable Web-Based Telemicroscopy Project for K-12 Classrooms

Bugscope is a new educational project in the World Wide Laboratory. The World Wide Laboratory provides Web browser based control of scientific imaging instrumentation using the Internet [1]. Providing K-12 classrooms with web based remote access to sophisticated scientific imaging systems was initially demonstrated by us in 1996 in the Chickscope project [2,3]. Chickscope allowed students to study chicken embryo development using a remotely controlled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system from their classrooms. While the Chickscope project was highly successful, the resources required to provide operational support for the remote imaging aspects of the project for a small number of classrooms were enormous and the project was not sustainable. The Bugscope project builds on the methods developed and the lessons learned from the Chickscope project. The primary goal is to demonstrate that relatively low cost, sustainable access to an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) can be made available to K-12 classrooms to examine arthropods.Methods: Classrooms use a standard web browser over the Internet to control and acquire images from a Philips XL-30FEG ESEM. The architecture to support remote acquisition is shown in fig. 1. The client/server control architecture for the ESEM remote control server is based on the emScope control library [4].