Analyze & Design Projects: Citizen Science with Zooniverse
These Afghan children could contribute to science using their computer.Copyright 2010 Michal Hvorecky, Slovak Republic via Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Computer_users_in_a_Kabul_marketplace,_22_October_2010.jpg
Students learn that ordinary citizens, including students like themselves, can make meaningful contributions to science through the concept of "citizen science." First, students learn some examples of ongoing citizen science projects that are common around the world, such as medical research, medication testing and donating idle computer time to perform scientific calculations. Then they explore Zooniverse, an interactive website that shows how research in areas from marine biology to astronomy leverage the power of the Internet to use the assistance of non-scientists to classify large amounts of data that is unclassifiable by machines for various reasons. To conclude, student groups act as engineering teams to brainstorm projects ideas for their own town that could benefit from community help, then design conceptual interactive websites that could organize and support the projects.
In this activity, students explore several citizen science projects to see how engineering can be used to make advances in scientific research. Like engineers, they analyze the design of one of the citizen science projects to first understand the need driving the project. Specifically they learn about the problem that needs to be solved, the basics of how that problem is solved, and how the project's design could potentially be improved. Then they work in small groups to design citizen science projects of their own.
After completing this activity, students should be able to:
- Describe what a specific citizen science project monitors/researches, how it does that, and how it enables researchers to make more informed decisions.
- Explain the practical societal benefits that a specific project might have.
- List the fields of science and engineering involved in a specific project and explain how each group contributes to the project.
- Explain the role of citizens in a specific citizen science project.
- Describe several projects in their own community that could benefit from the help of citizen scientists.