At-home STEM Activities: Citizen Science
To take part in science, you might think that you need to study for a long time, earn a degree or two, and spend years running experiments and research projects. But science is for more than just the experts—it’s for everyone! In fact, volunteers who may not have specialized backgrounds or trainings help make a lot of career scientists’ projects possible. This group effort between professional and amateur scientists to advance research in all sorts of fields is called citizen science.
So why do career scientists need our help?
With the aid of technology, gathering information for many research projects is easier now than ever. Gathering data can look like a lot of different things—photographs, measurements, and qualitative data, to name a few. This data can be collected by computers or by humans, and volunteers can help by taking those photos and measurements and taking part in surveys and studies.
While computers can collect data, they can’t always process that information, and this is where volunteer scientists are really helpful. Fields like ecology, astronomy, medicine, statistics, and psychology, among others, require distinctly human skills and experiences to make research within them successful. To ensure they’re making the correct conclusions, scientists need to collect a lot of data. A science research team is usually made up of less than 10 people, and for a group that small to slough through all that information, it would take a really long time! But, that’s where citizen science comes in. When that data processing is opened up to anyone that is curious or interested in the research topic, many hands can make light (and quick!) work.
How do I get involved?
There are lots of websites where scientists list their projects, here are a few:
CitizenScience.gov: An official U.S. government website that features a catalog of federally supported citizen science projects.
SciStarter.org: Starting as a project for a graduate student, Darlene Cavalier of the University of Pennsylvania, SciStarter acts as a hub for scientists to post their crowdsourcing research projects. These projects are open to people all over the world, and SciStarter includes special sections that designate projects that are a good fit for groups like Girl Scout troops, libraries, and schools.
Zooniverse.org: All projects on Zooniverse can be done from the comfort of your own home! From counting penguins and marine iguanas to identifying spiral galaxies, you can contribute to real science research on your computer.
A screen shot of the research project “Penguin Watch” on Zooniverse
