Chickscope

The Illinois Chickscope(ILCS) project is a professional development program for K-12 teachers in central Illinois and University of Illinois preservice teachers.

The Illinois Chickscope (ILCS) project has six major objectives:

• To demonstrate what is required to scale up a successful local project to a larger community.
• To build collaborations between teachers, preservice teachers, and scientists in order to promote and facilitate scientific investigations using the Internet.
• To test the information infrastructure in the state of Illinois by providing a diverse range of classrooms with access to the interactive MRI database.
• To organize a clearinghouse for standards-based curriculum materials on chick embryology and MRI for kindergarten to high school classrooms.
• To assess the effectiveness of Illinois Chickscope in motivating and preparing teachers for incorporating inquiry-based learning and teaching in science and mathematics classrooms.
• To sustain Illinois Chickscope by making available a Web-based infrastructure and project expertise to all classrooms at the conclusion of the project.

Faculty and staff from eight university units provide a supporting infrastructure for the project: Curriculum and Instruction; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Mathematics; Veterinary Biosciences; Animal Sciences; Beckman Institute Visualization, Media and Imaging Laboratory; Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In addition: the Champaign County Farm Bureau, the Regional Office of Education SchoolWorks, and the Area IV Learning Technology Hub have supported the project.

• Publications, presentations, and outreach materials for Chickscope
• University of Illinois courses related to Chickscope
• 1999 Illinois Chickscope participants
• 1998 Illinois Chickscope participants

• The National Science Foundation
• The Illinois Board of Higher Education
• The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
• The Lumpkin Foundation
• The Committee on Institutional Cooperation
• The University of Illinois Research Board

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