Kelp from Space: A Citizen Science Powered Classroom Experience

Each year, many thousands of college students will enroll in introductory science courses in order to fulfill their university's core requirements. Given that the vast majority of these students will not be pursuing higher level science courses, it is likely their introductory courses will serve as their last formal exposure to science. For this reason, designing curricular materials that emphasize the epistemology of science, while at the same time engaging students in critical thinking and promoting data literacy is key for increasing the science capitol of these students. The incorporation of citizen science into the classroom is one way to provide students with the ability to make meaningful contributions to active research with minimal barriers to entry. Our curricular materials were developed around the citizen science project Floating Forests ( http://floatingforests.org ), a geoscience-based project created with the goal to globally map giant kelp in landsat satellite imagery. Floating Forests is currently active on the Zooniverse ( https://www.zooniverse.org ), the world's largest online platform for citizen science. The activity we developed provides introductory geoscience students with the opportunity to make direct contributions to the Floating Forests project, while also honing their data literacy skills by delving into a Floating Forests data export that highlights the effects of ocean warming on giant kelp populations in the Southern Hemisphere. We will begin pilot testing our curricular materials with 7 participating universities (~3,000 students) in August 2020. Due to the increased demand for online classroom materials in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, our Floating Forests activity has been made accessible for classrooms functioning fully online. The Zooniverse platform is user-friendly and platform agnostic; any student equipped for an online course can participate. The curriculum development and implementation phases are part of a multiyear effort which will ultimately lead to making these activities available on https://classroom.zooniverse.org .

This abstract is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant #IUSE 1821319