Globe at Night: Highlighting Innovations in Recruitment, Retention, Engagement, and Co-creation and Supporting Participant Learning and Action
Abstract
Globe at Night (https://www.globeatnight.org) raises public awareness of the disappearing starry night sky caused by light pollution by inviting citizen-scientists around the world to measure and submit night sky brightness observations where they live. During ten-days per month of moonless evenings, they record the night sky brightness in a "star hunt" for the faintest star visible by matching the appearance of a constellation to one of 7 star maps of progressively fainter stars. They then submit their choice of star map on-line or with a smart phone with their date, time and location to create a global map of light pollution.
Globe at Night has a 13-year history of creating innovations in recruitment, retention, engagement and co-creation of citizen-science project that help increase the diversity of participants, contribute to participant learning and lead to participant action. One example was a partnership with the National Park Service and National Geographic in the Tucson BioBlitz which had the Boy Scouts taking data in the national park west of Tucson, amateur astronomers and the public on east-west streets and park rangers in the national park east of Tucson. The result, picked up by media, showed 100 times decrease in brightness 25 miles east of city center. Globe at Night also co-created programs with SciStarter, the Girl Scouts, the International Years of Astronomy and of Light, the IAU100th anniversary and the annual Global Astronomy Month. Data has been used for school science projects, strengthening city ordinances and monitoring conditions near observatories sites. Recruitment and retention have been made easier for the participant with on-the-fly mapping used to see contributed observations immediately, online report pages in up to 28 languages, a Facebook page for the community, STEM and problem-based learning activities for elementary through high school students, etc. The presenter looks forward to discussing success stories and lessons learned.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED32A..09W
- Keywords:
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- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0840 Evaluation and assessment;
- EDUCATION;
- 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION;
- 0855 Diversity;
- EDUCATION