What is Bugscope?

The Bugscope project is an educational outreach program for K-12 classrooms that provides access to high powered microscopes.  These Insect Alphabet pictures are from a second grade class project at Yankee Ridge School.  The students created these books after comparing the adult cricket to a hatchling. They tried to find out how the adults and the hatchlings are the same and how they are different. Students in this classroom studied the metamorphosis of insects, asking questions like "Do crickets - like mealworms or caterpillars - experience dramatic change or are the young hatchlings just smaller versions of adult crickets?"  At first students made observations of the crickets to see if they could find any differences. They examined the eyes, antennae, head, thorax, abdomen and legs of common house crickets. Using the high powered Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) students discovered how the adult cricket is exactly like the hatchling and how it is different.

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