Tutorial

Annotating worms with Wurm

First, let's take a look at how C. elegans (our worm) moves

Awesome! What Wurm will do is show you an image (might be black and white, might be grayscale) of a worm that is usually in a complex shape. Your job is to draw the centerline of the worm from head to tail (or tail to head) in a single stroke. Watch this brief video to see how it works.

Now let's look at some more example images you might see pop up in Wurm and their 'correct' centerlines, shown in red.

Notice that sometimes the worms 'cross' themselves (lower left), and sometimes they don't (the remainder of the images above). If you can, start at a pointy end and trace along the middle of the worm so that there are no sharp corners, just smooth bends. And while you should try to keep your line in the center of the worm's body as much as possible, don't worry if you're a bit off, or if your hand is a bit shaky. Not too bad, eh? Let's look at a few images that are less obvious.

These shapes above are trickier to figure out a correct centerline - skinny or pointy bits usually indicate an end, but when you see something like the image second from the right, use the width of the white space to inform where the head and tail might be overlapping. You might also see images like the one furthest to the right. You can tell where one end is, but little else. Just give us your best guess for these! We know they are ambiguous, that's why our human intelligence is so useful!

Lastly, sometimes you might see images that hardly look like worms (they're actually partial worms), like those on the left above. These you can just skip by clicking the 'Next Random' button. If you do accidentally annotate them, that's fine, too. You might also see worms that have chunks missing from the worm body, or that have two disconnected halves, like the images on the right. If it looks like a whole worm split into a few parts, go ahead and annotate it!

Alright, now you've done your homework, here's the link to download the app:

v. 1.01 https://goo.gl/k3uFqh

v. 1.02 https://goo.gl/FdjjQ5

v. 1.04 https://goo.gl/58Eb2p

v. 1.05 https://goo.gl/SEVNZQ

Note that it currently works with Android v. 5-7 (Marshmallow, Lollipop, Nougat). You will also need to enable the installation of third party apps (albeit momentarily).

Go forth and Wurm!