How Do You Maintain Science Learning While on Summer Break? Citizen Science

Posted by karencoghlan on June 25th, 2018 Posted in: Blog, Data
Tags: Data, data collection, data_science, science

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With summer break on the horizon, the question becomes what can I do with my kids that is entertaining and keeps their curiosity?  The answer is citizen science.

This is where data collection and/or analysis is distributed to members of the public –  kids, adults – collect the data.  Or on rainy days, data, such as images of space, are made available to the public and you can be the scientist and analyze it.  From a data perspective, citizen scientist information is useful for gathering observational data in many locations at the same time or for performing pattern analysis.

There are many projects:

• At Galaxy Zoo a series of telescope images have been released and members of the public are asked to classify the galaxies https://www.citizensciencealliance.org/
• At CitizenScience.gov There is a catalog various government based citizen science projects that volunteers can join  https://www.citizenscience.gov/
• The Biomedical Citizen Science Hub is great if you are interested in biomedicine http://citscibio.org/
• At SciStarter  there is a search tool where you can add your location say a city, a park, or the beach, and choose a topic such as nature, geography, physics, or health – just about anything that might be of interest. https://scistarter.com/

If you want to stay local or are going on a trip you can still be a citizen scientist. The great news is these activities can be done anywhere by anyone so there is no reason for the kids to say “I’m bored” instead have them be a citizen scientist for a day, a week or for the summer.