Real-life science for students
We know students learn best when faced with real challenges. ABC Science journalist Kylie Andrews explains ways schools can get involved with real marine science research.
We're looking for citizen scientists to help identify kelp and sea urchins on the seafloor.
Explore the Seafloor is an online citizen science project undertaken by ABC Science in conjunction with the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) as part of National Science Week 2013.
Throughout August we're on a mission to help scientists with two important research projects - mapping the location of kelp, and monitoring sea urchin populations. It's all part of a plan to best manage our marine ecosystems in the face of climate change.
The job of identifying kelp and urchins in the seafloor photos is normally done by research assistants and is time-consuming and laborious. In Explore the Seafloor we'll be taking a crowd-sourcing approach to reduce this workload and ask regular folk to get involved and help the scientists with their research work.
This crowd-sourcing approach is called citizen science – it's about using the power of the people to increase the breadth of science by gathering or processing information important to a scientific project.
The project is open to individuals and school groups - you don't need to be a scientist, you just need to have access to the internet and want to help. Simply look at seafloor photos online and tag what you see. More than 100,000 photos have already been identified and it's climbing rapidly.
Your school can get involved
Schools are especially encouraged to take part – over 140 school groups have already registered. A simple tutorial show's how to do the identifying, which is easy and fun to do - my 6-year-old daughter really loves marking the kelp!
To take part as a school you need parental approval for the students to participate. Once you have this, an adult needs to register the school group with an email address and a password. Students will use these to login and participate. Any number of students can take part at once, and while they work individually, their work will count towards a collective score.
Once your group has completed 50 photos you can enter the competition to win an underwater camera for your school group.
Our citizen scientists are doing around 20 images each at the moment. It's fantastic work with real value to the scientists who are completely thrilled!