"This project involved my students in an area of technology that few high school students have a chance to experience. They learned the possibilities of interactive technology while learning about MRI imaging and fetal development."

--High School Teacher

"My students gained knowledge about embryonic development and MRI. They learned new skills in using the World Wide Web and e-mail. My students also felt as though they were a community of learners playing an integral role in a project. They felt like respected people who were given control of an expensive machine."

--Middle School Teacher

"My children are constantly involved in discovery learning, always questioning where things come from, what makes things work, etc. Being able to look inside an egg was a wonderful way to learn about life cycles and what goes on inside."

--Primary School Teacher

"The children were thrilled to watch the images appear as they manipulated the MRI from our classroom. We watched in wonder as we viewed the pictures of the chick's development inside the egg, and candled our own eggs to see if we could find those same characteristics developing."

--Primary School Teacher

This web site is no longer active, and serves as a "museum" of earlier Chickscope efforts. Consequently, little to no time has been invested in assuring that the external hyperlinks, and those in the "cpotter" section, are accurate and working. Proceed at your own risk.

In the spring of 1996, 10 classrooms ranging from kindergarten through high school participated in Chickscope, a collaborative 21-day chick embryology project initiated by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We wanted to provide elementary and high-school students with access, via the WWW, to instruments not found in a classroom laboratory. And we wanted to provide students with a link to the scientific community through the WWW.

Each classroom was given fertilized eggs, incubators and educational materials on egg science and candling, courtesy of the 4-H Cooperative Extension Program. At the same time each day a fertilized egg was placed in a magnetic resonance imaging instrument at the Beckman Institute Magnetic Resonance Imaging Laboratory. Through an interactive website, students remotely controlled the MRI device to obtain images of the developing chick. The website was developed by the Beckman Institute Visualization Facility, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Laboratory, and NCSA .

The classrooms received daily images of the egg and shared their observations, predictions, and questions (answered by our team of scientists) via the WWW. Through the Chickscope website, they received educational material, daily reports of the chick's development, and sample MRI images for the day.

We realized our goal when the students and teachers became part of the scientific community by sharing their learning exercises, observations, predictions, and questions with us and with other participating classrooms.

The most successful experiences occurred when teachers creatively included Chickscope in their daily lessons. In the future, you can check out the Teacher's Lounge to see the ways that K-12 teachers and student teachers incorporated Chickscope into their daily lessons.

Chickscope has come to a close, but you can still browse through the original project. We'd like to thank everyone who participated in Chickscope and we hope you participate again next year!

Next year? Did someone say next year???? Read on...