Thousands of people currently use redworms to process organic kitchen waste to reduce waste going to landfills and incinerators. Teachers report that a classroom worm bin excites children and provides multidisciplinary learning opportunities. Researchers are identifying suitable materials and technologies to enable middle school teachers to improve their teaching of science. Earthworms provide excellent opportunities for viewing evidence of physiological functioning inside the organism. Young worms are translucent prior to pigment development. Suitable magnification permits one to view digestive tract movements and pumping of the pairs of hearts. The emergence of worms from their cocoons can be observed. More challenging is what the inside of a worm's burrow actually looks like. By adapting currently available technologies of videomicroscopy and the use of fiber optics as developed for endoscopy in medicine, a videotape record of these phenomena is being produced. The purposes of this research are to obtain teacher and student evaluations of existing videotapes and to determine the optimum array of videomicroscopic imaging devices to record live earthworms.The potential commercial application as described by the awardee: Footage produced during this project will be incorporated into video-, video disc-, and CD-ROM-technology to enhance teacher training and classroom instruction by using noninvasive methods to observe live processes and environment of earthworms.
