IF YOU WERE INSPIRED BY THE STORIES IN THIS BOOK, THEN I HOPE YOU are wondering: “What’s next?”
There are many ways to get involved in citizen science, or more deeply involved than you already are. Citizen science is rapidly growing. That’s great news—but it can also be confusing and overwhelming. It isn’t easy to navigate the maze of old and new projects, many of which concern similar topics. Adding to the complexity is that some projects and resources are unexpectedly temporary, and some are specifically local or regional. Where are you needed? Where will you be welcomed? Where can you lend a hand to what’s of most concern to you?
This book is static, but projects of citizen science are dynamic—it is an ever-changing landscape. Rather than compile a list of projects and resources that would soon be out-of-date, I want to point you to a one-stop-shop, the Amazon of citizen science choices. It’s called SciStarter.
For the past several years I’ve been working as part of an amazing crew at SciStarter.com, led by Darlene Cavalier (the founder of the Science Cheerleaders who you met in chapter 6). With help from the National Science Foundation we’ve been building new features and functionality to this website. As this book goes to press, we have over 1,500 citizen science projects in the SciStarter ecosystem—that makes SciStarter the largest collection of citizen science projects in the world. Project owners add their projects to SciStarter for free; citizen scientists join for free. We help them find one another. As you begin to explore the world of citizen further, you can easily keep track of the projects you’ve joined, contributed to, or simply bookmarked through your personal SciStarter dashboard.
Enter and join via website: www.SciStarter.com/Cooper and you’ll be tagged as my guest.
I want you to start your voyage into SciStarter from my landing page for two reasons: first, so that I can welcome you to the site and guide you in how to use this resource to navigate the evolving world of citizen science; and second, I want to know you as a budding citizen scientists, in a research sense. Go to my landing page as your path to joining SciStarter and YOU can be part of a big experiment, part of the cohort that came to SciStarter after reading this book. We want to see what you do, what projects you like, and learn what we can from you in order to help you have the best citizen science experiences imaginable.
A SPECIAL CALL TO TEACHERS AND EDUCATORS
Teachers help students grow into well-rounded adults. In school, students learn art and sports, which become career paths for a few and meaningful hobbies for most. Similarly, even without choosing science as a career path, students can learn how to participate in making new discoveries through citizen science. When teachers can offer authentic, hands-on science experiences, students can gain a love for discovery and a lifelong curiosity to understand not only what is already known but also what is not yet know. As a form of civic engagement and volunteerism, citizen science is useful in classes other than science too.
A one-stop-shop of resources for bringing citizen science into schools and classrooms is Students Discover: www.StudentsDiscover.org
At Students Discover, the lesson plans are freely shared for K-12 and increasingly for university classrooms too. Each lesson plan was developed collaboratively among teachers, scientists, and design teams and align with Next Generation Science Standards and/or Common Core Standards.