Approach, Activities, & Results
The organization received a grant from the Simons Foundation to create open, customizable, plug-and-play software tools for ease of use, including application programming interface (API) documentation. [3] Once projects are reviewed and shared on the site, anyone living within the prescribed geographic area of a study with internet access to the site can input live data. Information about SciStarter projects are also shared on the organization's partner sites, [4] who export or import records with the SciStarter database. SciStarter's partner organizations include CitSci.org, the Atlas of Living Australia, Discover Magazine, the CitizenSci blog on the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the Philadelphia Media Network, Cornerstones of Science, the PBS television show "The Crowd and the Cloud", the PBS Kids television show "SciGirls," The TerraMar Project, Astronomy Magazine, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and AllforGood.org. [5]
SciStarter began a partnership with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) to provide elementary, middle, high school, and college science teachers with age-appropriate citizen science-related activities for science classrooms. [6]
In 2012–2013, SciStarter organized a contest on the Instructables site to have participants develop do it yourself videos to support four different citizen science projects. [7] The activities included creating a less-expensive hail pad for a weather-related project, [8] creating methods of protecting sunflowers from animals before they are visited by bees, [9] helping encourage and remind participants to submit data for a plant observation project, [10] and finding low-cost methods for collecting and transmitting climate data wirelessly. [11]
In 2014, SciStarter partnered with the Science Cheerleaders and the Pop Warner Little Scholars organization to swab athletic shoes, smart phones, and other surfaces to identify the types of microbes growing in public spaces. Some of those microbes were launched to the International Space Station to observe their growth and behavior in microgravity. [12] The project managed to collect a new species of microorganism [13] and a draft genome for that species was subsequently mapped. [14]
Events
The organization announced a partnership with the Citizen Science Association to organize an annual "Citizen Science Day" with the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, which first took place on April 16, 2016. [19] Citizen Science Day activities for 2017 started on April 15 and continued through May 20. [20]
In 2019, Citizen Science Day's featured activity is the Stall Catchers Megathon. This is an event where people meet-up in libraries to participate in an online project and help accelerate research on Alzheimer's disease. Stall Catchers (StallCatchers.com) is a citizen science project led by the Human Computation Institute. The Stall Catchers Megathon brings together thousands of people to classify 100,000 video images and complete an entire year's worth of analysis in one day. [21]
On June 20, 2017, Darlene Cavalier and Dr. Caren Cooper presented information [22] about citizen science and SciStarter to attendees from the National Science Foundation, United States Geological Survey, United States Department of Energy, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Environmental Protection Agency, NPR, National Park Service, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, and other organizations. They presented trends, opportunities, and challenges in citizen science (particularly related to recruiting, training, equipping and retaining participants).
This event included:
- a brief overview of citizen science;
- a presentation and soft-launch of SciStarter 2.0, a smart collection of web components, including a dashboard and integrated login, designed to extend, enhance, and enrich participant experiences while at the same time supporting STEM research and enabling research on motivations and learning outcomes of participants;
- and a discussion on future directions for SciStarter 3.0, given the opportunities and challenges facing participants, project organizers/researchers, and supporting agencies and foundations.
SciStarter partners with Discover Magazine, Astronomy Magazine and the Science Cheerleaders to activate citizen science at live events including the USA Science and Engineering Festival, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Family Science Days, the Philadelphia Science Festival, the Atlanta Science Festival, the Arizona Science and Technology Festival, the Cambridge Science Festival, the World Science Festival, SciStarter organized citizen science events at March for Science events across the country. [23]
The Genographic Project, launched on 13 April 2005 by the National Geographic Society and IBM, was a genetic anthropological study that aimed to map historical human migrations patterns by collecting and analyzing DNA samples. The final phase of the project was Geno 2.0 Next Generation. Upon retirement of the site, 1,006,542 participants in over 140 countries had joined the project.
The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a public research project which aims "to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome."
Citizen science is research conducted with participation from the general public, or amateur/nonprofessional researchers or participants for science, social science and many other disciplines. There are variations in the exact definition of citizen science, with different individuals and organizations having their own specific interpretations of what citizen science encompasses. Citizen science is used in a wide range of areas of study including ecology, biology and conservation, health and medical research, astronomy, media and communications and information science.
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The institute is independently governed and supported as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization under the name Broad Institute Inc., and it partners with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the five Harvard teaching hospitals.
Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University's Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio's Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Through his Harvard lab Church has co-founded around 50 biotech companies pushing the boundaries of innovation in the world of life sciences and making his lab as a hotbed of biotech startup activity in Boston. In 2018, the Church lab at Harvard made a record by spinning off 16 biotech companies in one year. The Church lab works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, info processing, medical genetics, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church lab have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies. In 2017, Time magazine listed him in Time 100, the list of 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was featured among the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma, and was listed among the top 8 famous geneticists of all time in human history. As of January 2023, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
The National Science Teaching Association (NSTA), founded in 1944 and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, is an association of science teachers in the United States and is the largest organization of science teachers worldwide. NSTA's current membership of roughly 40,000 includes science teachers, science supervisors, administrators, scientists, business and industry representatives, and others involved in and committed to science education.
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
DragonflyTV is an Emmy Award-winning science education television series produced by Twin Cities Public Television. The show aired on PBS Kids and PBS Kids Go! from January 19, 2002, to December 20, 2008. It was aimed at ages 9–12. Seasons 1–4 were co-hosted by Michael Brandon Battle and Mariko Nakasone. Seasons 5–7 were hosted by Eric Artell and were produced in partnership with science museums. DragonflyTV was created in collaboration with Project Dragonfly at Miami University, which founded Dragonfly magazine, the first national magazine to feature children's investigations, experiments, and discoveries. DragonflyTV pioneered a "real kids, real science" approach to children's science television and led to the development of the SciGirls television series. DragonflyTV and SciGirls were funded in part by the National Science Foundation to provide a national forum for children's scientific investigations. Reruns of DragonflyTV aired on select PBS stations until 2010, and later in off-network cable syndication to allow commercial stations to meet federal E/I mandates.
VA is a non-profit association that wants to promote dialogue and openness between researchers and the general public. VA operates primarily in Sweden, but with an eye on European and International science communication including several new EU projects. The organization was founded in 2002 and is currently based from Grev Turegatan 14 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Darlene Cavalier is an American professor of practice at Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society. She is the founder of SciStarter, founder of Science Cheerleaders, cofounder of ECAST: Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology, and she led the ideation and a team of collaborators to develop ScienceNearMe.org to connect, promote and research all types of opportunities for the public to engage in science.
Science Buddies, formerly the Kenneth Lafferty Hess Family Charitable Foundation, is a non-profit organization that provides a website of free science project productivity tools and mentoring to support K-12 students, especially for science fairs. Founded in 2001 by engineer and high-tech businessman, Kenneth Hess, Science Buddies features STEM content and services to assist students and educators. Since its founding, it has expanded its original mission to provide teacher resources targeted for classroom and science fair use.
The maker culture is a contemporary subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture that intersects with hardware-oriented parts of hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of computer numeric control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and, mainly, its predecessor, traditional arts and crafts.
Hsinchun Chen is the Regents' Professor and Thomas R. Brown Chair of Management and Technology at the University of Arizona and the Director and founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. He also served as lead program director of the Smart and Connected Health program at the National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2015. He received a B.S. degree from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, an MBA from SUNY Buffalo and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Information Systems from New York University.
Eyewire is a citizen science game from Sebastian Seung's Lab at Princeton University. It is a human-based computation game that uses players to map retinal neurons. Eyewire launched on December 10, 2012. The game utilizes data generated by the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research.
iNaturalist is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applications. iNaturalist includes an automated species identification tool, and users further assist each other in identifying organisms from photographs. As of 17 June 2023, iNaturalist users had contributed approximately 161,278,660 observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, and around 350,000 users were active in the previous 30 days.
The Citizen Science Association (CSA) is a United States member-based professional organization for practitioners and researchers of citizen science, where scientific research is conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists. The Association aims to expand the reach, relevance, and impact of science and research in the United States and internationally. The CSA was founded in 2013 in the United States and was recognized as a charitable organization with a 501c3 designated status in June 2017.
Caren Beth Cooper is an American professor and scholar at North Carolina State University, citizen science advocate, and author of two books on citizen science. Her doctoral dissertation addressed the effects of habitat fragmentation on the Australian passerine. Her scientific publications concentrate primarily on ornithology as well as citizen science contributions to science and diversity, equity, and inclusion in underserved communities.
