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 will 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 will be involved in the project.

Thirty-two teachers, seven more than originally projected, were selected to participate in the Illinois Chickscope project. These teachers will be participating in the spring, summer, and fall semesters of 1998. Eventually each teacher's school will have a home page of some degree on this web server. The pages listed here are just the beginning.

ILCS teachers discuss their findings in the Chickscope Scratchings ILCS forum. The forums may be read by all, but only ILCS members may post at this time. Questions about this policy or about Chickscope in general may be directed to chickscope@chickscope.beckman.uiuc.edu.