Recruiting citizens to assist professional scientists carry out important research is a burgeoning approach. Indeed, citizen scientists have discovered planets beyond our Solar System and established morphological classifications for thousands of galaxies (e.g., the Planet Hunters and Galaxy Zoo projects). Those projects provide citizens access to high-quality data, such as observations from NASA’s famed Hubble space telescope. Essentially, there are not enough professional astronomers to classify the billions of targets throughout the Universe, and students and citizens worldwide are recruited to help. Students will choose one astronomy-related citizen science project from the list provided by the ZooUniverse collaboration, and engage in the effort throughout the semester. A video posted below conveys how a biology teacher in Belgium engaged in a citizen science project and discovered a new phenomenon scientists had not identified before.
Students will create a 500-1000 word forum post that should include:
- a description of the principal impetus behind their project and the scientific questions being addressed.
- comments on what surprises and results emerged.
- at least three screenshots or plots should be included in the post to earn marks (recall the assignment is marked pass/fail).
- a statement as to whether the student would recommend this project to others.
Students should also submit three follow-up comments concerning a fellow student’s forum post. Blackboard will not register the task as complete otherwise.
The assignment (text & images) should be posted directly within this Blackboard forum, and PDF or Word files should be avoided if possible.
