Enjoy the evidence-based benefits of consistent outdoor learning.
You don’t even need to be a teaching expert, scientist, or experienced naturalist to do it.
What is citizen science?
Citizen science is a branch of the scientific field that helps to bridge the gap between professional and amateur scientists by involving amateurs in professional, scientific research. The most common citizen science initiatives involve community members following an accessible protocol in order to collect and upload data (usually photos or count data of plants or animals) into a public database. The database itself might be setup to answer a driving question, or simply be a data repository for scientists and community members to access as questions arise.
In our curated list of favorite citizen science projects, formal and home educators can identify an easy-start project for nearly any outdoor classroom or schoolyard that also easily connects to learning standards.
Highlight: Budburst
One of our favorite go-to’s for citizen science is Budburst (formerly Project Budburst). Budburst was originally designed to answer phenology questions related to, How are plants responding to climate change? Its focus began with tracking the phenology of a few key tree species. You can now submit phenology data for any vascular plant species, and there are additional projects investigating the impact of climate change and plant phenology on pollinators. The history of the project alone demonstrates how scientists adapt their questions and protocols over time.
With so much of student mental distress tied to feelings of helplessness around climate, Budburst is a natural project to relieve “climate anxiety” and connect student learning to environmental literacy and civic action.
What we love
For educators who don’t have much experience teaching outside or who aren’t plant or animal taxonomists, this project is an easy entry point to get students outside regularly.
Gain an excuse: A growing number of educators know better, but some admins perceive the schoolyard as a recess-only space. If your admin (or conventionally-minded conscience) “catches” you on your way outside, regardless of the other exercises you do (see our weather journaling resource for a comment about breathwork), your students “must go outside in order to collect data they need for their math AND science lessons.”
Form a habit: To track phenology, you must collect data repeatedly over time. With Budburst, it is easy to pick a tree (or five), and schedule regular learning time to check it once per week. The check on each plant could take as few as two minutes. So, if you’ve only got a few students, we recommend you pick a couple of trees. If you’ve got an entire class but only a few plants to study, organize them into groups and assign roles, switching roles each week. Add a sit spot or journaling activity to the excursion.
Access reliable data: Your observations will change, but the plant itself (if you pick a tree) will be consistently in the same place every day and any time of day (keep the chainsaws away). This means you don’t have to make any special scheduling allowances to do the project with your 1st period and 5th period classes.
Support science and math literacy: Budburst setup a driving question, but by engaging in this project, your students will be making observations of the world and doing so in a way that will inevitably stimulate questions. Yours is the pleasure of helping them investigate the ancillary questions they have. Your class will also be collecting its own data and able to access a much larger, worldwide dataset. You can download the data to make charts and graphs, practice calculations, and support any number of real-world examples of math in action. You are limited only by the extent of your creativity in applying your teaching standards to your data collection activities.
Connect with community: Like many others, Budburst is a public database, so you can see the identity and locations of others’ submissions. It can be a fun way for students to realize that others are enjoying themselves enough to do on their own what the students are doing in class.
Build career awareness: By exposing students to different types of research questions, participation in citizen science can stimulate an interest in careers to which students might not otherwise be exposed. There are many examples of professionals who were inspired into their careers by their volunteer participation in a related citizen science project.
Use pre-developed K-12 resources: By nature of being a citizen science project, Budburst has a variety of support materials to help you as a non-expert to collect reliable, quality data. This includes providing definitions of terms, simple protocols, and even guides to help you identify species. Project leaders have also invested time in developing ready-to-roll activities for classrooms and families. Simply download a lesson, grab your clipboards and pencils, and head outside.
Setup classroom groups to collect each classrooms’ data: Educators can setup groups for each classroom and can even create anonymous accounts. This will allow the students to input and explore their own data, filtered from the larger Budburst database. So, not only will students be able to see their data over the course of the semester or school year, you can vertically integrate this project into the curriculum so that students continue to collect data for multiple years. With the phenology of species responding differently to weather, it can be really fun to look back and see the phenological differences that some species experience between years!