The ten participating classrooms during the Spring 1996 semester ranged from kindergarten to high school, including an after-school science club and an out-of-state home school.

There were nine teachers who were participating in the project-four high school teachers, one middle school teacher, two elementary school teachers, one primary school teacher, and one out-of-state home school parent teacher. One of the elementary school teachers was also a supporting teacher for the after-school science club, and so there were nine participating teachers for ten classrooms. All teachers were women, except for one high school teacher. The teachers were selected based on their classroom access to the Internet, interest in Chickscope project, and plans for integrating it into their curriculum.

There was a total of about 210 students in the ten participating classrooms. Eight of the classrooms were in the Champaign-Urbana area. There was one high school classroom from a rural community (Teutopolis) in Illinois, and a home school classroom from South Carolina. In addition to K-12 students and teachers, fifteen undergraduate students participated in this project by assisting in the classrooms.

Classroom teachers attended the teacher training day (April 3, 1996) at the university, where they received an introduction to MRI along with an overview of chick embryo development. Procedures for acquiring images were discussed. Teachers were provided with hands-on demonstration on MR image acquisitions. Classroom incubators and resource materials from the Champaign County Cooperative Extension Service were distributed. Following the training day and before project start date, teachers were given an opportunity to participate in a classroom test on acquiring images from their school computers.

As the participating teachers were from different grade levels and had a varying level of access to computing resources, they developed innovative ways of integrating the project into their classroom curriculum. Four short examples from different grade levels are provided as illustrations. All four classrooms in these examples had access to the MRI system twice a week for 20 minutes each day.