Technical Report 00-008: Formative Evaluation of Bugscope: A Sustainable World Wide Laboratory for K-12

Formative Evaluation of Bugscope: A Sustainable World Wide Laboratory for K-12

U. Thakkar,¹ B. Carragher,^* L. Carroll,⁺ C. Conway,^#B. Grosser,^* N. Kisseberth,^* C. S. Potter,^*S. Robinson,^* J. Sinn-Hanlon,^* D. Stone,^#and D. Weber^*

National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Department of Curriculum and Instruction

^* Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

⁺ Department of Entomology

^# University Laboratory High School
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801

Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of American Educational Research Association,
Special Interest Group on Advanced Technologies for Learning,
New Orleans, Louisiana, April 24-28, 2000.²

Abstract

Bugscope is an emerging educational technology project that allows students and teachers across K-12 to study insects and other arthropods through remote access and control of an environmental scanning electron microscope from their classroom computers. Teachers and students in 33 schools from 18 states in the United States and the US Virgin Islands were selected to participate during the first year of the project. This paper provides an overview and a formative evaluation of the project in order to assess its current impact and to guide further development.

Contents
Introduction	2
Background	3
Bugscope Infrastructure	4
Formative Evaluation	5
Conclusions	6
Acknowledgements	7
References	8
A PDF Version of this Technical Report (1.2MB)	9

Dr. Umesh Thakkar
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801
uthakkar@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Technical Report 00-008

Date Issued: 17 April 2000

¹ To whom all correspondence should be addressed.

² The title of the abstract submitted for review in August, 1999, was "Preliminary Evaluations of Bugscope: A Sustainable World Wide Laboratory for K-12."

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