Serving God and Neighbor through Citizen Science

Citizen Science is a way that people of all ages and from all walks of life can make valuable contributions to different fields of study by participating in research along with professionals in these fields. The “citizen” part means that you don’t need any special qualifications to participate. By participating in activities like counting animals and identifying their behaviors by inspecting photographs or videos from around the world, citizen scientists help professional scientists carry out research projects that would simply be too big for scientists to complete by themselves. Sometimes citizen scientists even make new discoveries!

Zooniverse is the largest and most popular online platform for citizen science, where anyone can participate in research in many areas of science and the humanities. Zooniverse projects are led by teams at over 120 educational and research institutions around the world. More than 2 million adults and children around the world participate in Zooniverse projects, individually as well as in classrooms.

Is it Hard to Get Started? What if I Make a Mistake?

After you create a Zooniverse account, you can start participating in a project within minutes. Participation is a great family activity! Even very young children can participate with their parents on their parents’ account(s). It’s up to you to decide how deeply you want to become involved with a project. Some people only spend minutes working on a project, while others participate over weeks or even longer. Each project has its own tutorial that shows you how to participate. Depending upon the type of research project, you’ll be asked to help identify or measure things in different kinds of “subjects.” Subjects can be images, photographs, texts, graphs, or even sound recordings.

Many people ask, “What if I make a mistake?” Don’t worry—just do the best you can! In all of the projects, a number of people examine each individual subject. On average, participants do an excellent job, and occasionally even make new discoveries! Through “Talk” discussion boards, you can ask general questions, learn more about individual research projects directly from project team members, and interact with other citizen scientists.

Zooniverse can be used equally well with individuals or groups. For example, it’s perfect for retirees, families, homeschoolers, youth groups or summer camp activities, Christian school science classrooms, and other educational programs for children or adults. There are many great resources for educators, with suggestions on how Zooniverse can be used in classrooms from elementary school through college. Many of the “camera trap” projects that ask participants to identify different species of animals work especially well with younger children (for example, see Penguin Watch in the classroom), while some of the physics and space science projects may be more appropriate for high school students (for example, see Galaxy Zoo for Education).

If you’re using Zooniverse for a class project, it’s good to check the “project statistics” on the project’s home page to see how close the project is to being finished. This is important if you need a project to stay active over a certain period of time. When in doubt, you can always ask project team members through the project’s discussion board.