Educators and researchers from several departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign initiated Chickscope, a chicken embryonic development project, to demonstrate the remote control of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system through the World Wide Web.

Chickscope overview is a tutorial for interested teachers and parents. For 21 days (April 10 to May 1, 1996), students and teachers from ten classrooms ranging from kindergarten to high school participated in Chickscope. MR imaging was integrated into classroom curriculum in a variety of ways. The project materials are accessible for use in the classroom, but this overview provides a convenient starting point.

Using computers in their classrooms with access to the Internet, students and teachers were able to login to the computers at the university that controlled the MRI system, manipulate experimental conditions through a simple Web interface to generate their own data, and then view the resulting MR images of the chick embryo in real time. Figure 1 shows a sample image acquisition through the simple interface by primary school classroom students. Researchers at the university answered students' questions about the images and related issues.

Figure 1: A sample image acquisition by the primary school classroom

Remote control of scientific instruments over the Internet is commonly referred to as remote instrumentation. Using a standard Web browser, researchers, teachers, or students in any location and at any time have the potential to access the latest scientific instruments without having to travel to a remote site or invest in the hardware themselves. Accordingly, the Web becomes a laboratory-a World Wide Laboratory (see the ITG Remote Microscopy page). Chickscope is a working example of this WWL concept.