Lenticular cloud in the Canary Islands. Photo by student meteorologist Mario M. Labrador, age 12.

As summer comes to a close, a young person’s fancy may turn to fretting at the thought of being cooped up in a classroom. But for fans of science and nature—and by that we mean kids who like to watch clouds, hunt mushrooms, prowl around graveyards, and check out what gets squashed on the side of the road—fall need not signal the end of fun.

To keep young minds entertained as well as enlightened, we recommend the following 10 back-to-school projects for student citizen scientists. Teachers and parents, please note: Many of these programs provide materials around which you can build lessons. And there are lots more where these came from.  Visit our Project Finder for a full list of citizen science projects for primary and secondary school students.

Students’ Cloud Observations On-Line (S’COOL): Report your observations of clouds—their shapes, height, coverage, and related conditions—so that NASA scientists can compare them with data from weather satellites passing over your area. Tutorials and observing guides are available for students. For teachers, the program provides lesson plans, charts, and advice on related educational standards.

Tracking Climate in Your Backyard: This project teaches volunteer meteorologists aged 8 to 12 about the scientific process by enlisting them in the collection of weather data in their communities. Download free support material and curriculum.

Gravestone Project: With Halloween less than two months off, here’s an appropriate activity for young citizen scientists: Map the location of cemeteries near you using a GPS device. Then, following instructions on the project website, measure the rate at which marble gravestones erode at each site due to weathering. You’ll be helping researchers determine changes in the acidity of rainfall between locations and over time.

Roadkill Project: From science in the cemetery, it’s a small hop over to science on the side of the road. In this project, students collect data on the presence of roadkill on a defined stretch of pavement. Comparing observations with those of their fellow roadkill researchers, participants learn about local animals’ habitats and migratory patterns, make predictions about which animals are at most and least risk of being killed by vehicles, and study the effects of geography and topography.

Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration: SCOPE needs citizen scientists to classify stars based on images of their spectra. After a quick registration and online tutorial, you can examine your first stellar spectrum and compare it to the “light signature” of well-known reference stars. Check out what high school student Eli Moorhouse wrote in our Member Blogs section about his recent adventures working on SCOPE.

Mushroom Observer: What weird and wonderful plants mushrooms are, not to mention numerous and mysterious. According to the Mushroom Observer project, “it is still a common experience to come across a mushroom that cannot be easily identified in the available books or which doesn’t really fit the definition of any recognized species.” Volunteers are invited to share observations, upload photos, and discuss findings with their fellow fungi fans.

Celebrate Urban Birds: Join the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and citizen ornithologists around the country in studying the presence and behavior of 16 species of birds in urban habitats. You’ll stake out an area about half the size of a basketball court and then spend 10 minutes on a designated day reporting on the presence or absence of these resident and migratory birds. A kit including posts and stickers is available from Cornell—or you can download most of the supporting materials from the website.

INSPIRE (Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionosphere Radio Experiments): Students who are into electronics, kit-building, and lightning will want to join this challenging hunt for “sferics.” Short for “atmospherics,” sferics are very low-frequency radio emissions that are often generated by lightning and interact with the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetic fields in ways that scientists want to better understand. After building their own radio receivers, students record these emissions and collaborate with NASA researchers. The program offers internships and scholarships for students as well as training courses for educators.

Great Lakes Worm Watch: What red-blooded student scientist could resist a hunt for earthworms? This program is limited to the critters in Minnesota, which, being non-native worms imported by early Europeans, are presumed to be changing the native forests of the region. Worm Watch needs volunteers to collect specimens; record habitat data in farmland, pastures, and parks; and conduct soil surveys where these “exotic” worms are found.

Lost Lizards of Los Angeles: Los Angeles students may be out of luck when it comes to hunting Minnesota earthworms, but here’s a nice alternative that’s still in the category of “slithery.” Help the LA County Natural History Museum look for and photograph lizards in its neighborhood. Herpetologists and museum staffers have noticed that lizards are mighty rare in their own backyard (LA’s Exposition Park). They launched the Lost Lizards program, drafting volunteers to study how urban development may be affecting this community of crawlers.

World-travelers may spot the spectacular yellow-winged darter, found in Europe and northern China. Photo: André Karwath (via Wikipedia)

While dragonflies and damselflies might belong to the same scientific class as the common housefly, the gossamer-winged zoomers seem a world apart from their less-enchanting six-legged cousins. Sitting outdoors in the San Juan Islands last weekend, I had a chance to observe a few blue dragonflies up close as they swooped in to check out our picnic.

Scientists all across the country are keeping an eye on these dazzling creatures as well, and they need your help to figure out where dragonflies range. In particular, the dragonfly hunters at Odonata Central are compiling a database of dragonflies and damselflies across the world. An interactive map lets you see what varieties of dragonflies have been reported in your neck of the woods. (Note: I found that this map worked well with my Safari browser, but not with Firefox.) Anyone with a digital camera and internet connection can register and then send in sightings of dragonflies to add to the database. Need help identifying what species you saw? The Odonata Central page has many photographs, as does the United States Geological Survey.

Many individual states have local monitoring groups as well. For example, those of you in the Chicago area can sign up to participate in the Dragonfly Monitoring Network. These scientists ask a commitment of attending one workshop in the spring, and then ask participants to send in reports of dragonfly sightings along specific routes. Other local dragonfly monitoring groups are found in New Hampshire and Ohio and many other states.

Coming up soon, dragonfly fanatics in New Mexico can join the Friends of Bitter Lake at their annual Dragonfly Festival from September 10 to 12 in Roswell, New Mexico. If you’re not in the area, head on out with your camera and try to capture some local dragonflies on film!

In Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, art reveals science.

Sometimes, science is the happy companion of art.

Take Spiral Jetty, a piece by the late sculptor Robert Smithson. In 1970, Smithson arranged 6,650 tons of basalt boulders into a spiral that reaches 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. Built during a drought, the stony coil soon disappeared beneath the lake’s rising, algae-reddened waters. Drought revealed the artwork once more in 2002 and again in spring 2010; its rise and fall clearly traces the changing climate.

Or consider Richard Misrach’s photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge. Taken over three years from the same spot on the porch of his Berkeley, California, house, they form a succinct record of light and weather. Similarly, artist Mark Klett created dramatic evidence of how time has altered the Western landscape when he re-photographed more than 100 geographic survey views, a century after the images were first taken. And don’t forget the year’s worth of atmospheric phenomena that Ken Murphy recently collected with his camera on the roof of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

And sometimes, art is the happy byproduct of science, as in the citizen-science effort known as Picture Post. This project wants you to do like Richard Misrach: Take photographs of the same place over a period of time, monitoring how the landscape and vegetation change.

It’s really that simple. Participants drive a wood or plastic post into the ground, then rest a digital camera on top and take an eight-shot panorama of the surrounding landscape, plus a photo of the sky directly overhead.

A Picture Post and its "habitat" in Maine.

You can set up a post to monitor the seasons in your backyard; you can choose a place that’s undergoing rapid change, such as a suburban development; you can track the natural rhythms of a preserve or park. You can team up with a school or community group or nature group that wants to “adopt” a post. The idea is to return to the post and repeat the photo sequence once every week or two throughout a season or a year, uploading your photos to the Picture Post site.  The result is a systematic document of  environmental change.

And, if you will, some very cool art. Take a look at some of the photo sequences on the site: seasons rush by, the landscape blooms and subsides, water rushes in and ebbs away.

The project organizers—Jeff Beaudry of the University of Southern Maine, Annette Schloss at the University of New Hampshire, John Pickle at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, and Fabio Carrera at Worcester Polytechnic Institute—have so far set up about 30 posts in the Northeastern United States and one in Italy. They could use a lot more, so sign up now! Do some science, make some art.

Think you can spot the difference between and a honey bee and a bumble bee? Well, there’s one day left to test your bee knowledge with the online Bee Challenge, brought to you by the folks at the Great Pollinator Project!

A collaboration between the Greenbelt Native Plant Nursery and the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, the Great Pollinator Project calls upon citizen scientists to help  researchers better understand the 200 species of bees that live  in New York City by observing and recording data on bees in their urban backyards, community gardens, or rooftops.  Why? For one thing, declines in certain bee populations may be affecting food production. Pollination–a primary function of bees–contributes to one-third of our food (fruits and vegetables)!

Looking for a great way to contribute to science while becoming an “A” Bee Student? Why not participate in the Great Pollinator Project?

Glowing bacteria, their DNA tagged with a fluorescing protein, will help students in Bard College's citizen science course learn about infectious diseases. Photo: Dr. Brooke Jude

Bard College, a liberal-arts school in New York state, is hoping to foster a lifelong interest in science with its new “Citizen Science Program,” a three-week intensive regimen required of all first-year students. The course, ready to roll in January 2011, aims to give all Bard’s freshmen in-depth exposure to scientific problem solving.

The director of the new program, Dr. Brooke Jude, spoke with me about this exciting venture, explaining that “the idea is to teach science to everybody. Even if a student doesn’t want to be a scientist later on, this will give them a chance to see how to do science in everyday life.”

The goal is for students to come away with a deeper understanding of how to formulate and test a hypothesis, as well as how to critically examine the science reports they see in the news.  Jude hopes that by mixing students who like science with those who are less scientifically inclined, “we’ll see an infectious liking-of-science bubble over to students who were nervous about it before.”

Speaking of “infectious” — the course will focus on “Infectious Diseases,” a topic deeply connected to the biology of bacteria (including the development of antibiotic-resistance) as well as to the policy side of modeling and controlling the spread of disease. During the course, every student will take part in three week-long modules: a biology lab, a computer modeling lab and a section on problem-based learning. In the biology lab module, students will perform experiments aimed at the question “How do viruses infect bacteria?” Some experiments will show DNA that’s been labeled with green fluorescent protein (GFP) moving between cells, allowing students to understand how the genes for antibiotic resistance can be traded between bacteria. Says Jude, “The beauty of working with bacteria is that they grow really fast.  You can do an experiment in a day!”

Not only can the Citizen Science program increase science literacy, says Jude, but it’s also a chance to foster connections with the world outside Bard’s walls. She is eager to get the students involved in the community, both as citizen scientists and through other outreach programs, including teaching science in elementary schools and working with groups such as Habitat for Humanity. One exciting aspect of this initiative, says Jude, is “reorienting first year students to there being civic engagement opportunities out in the community.”

Imagine: A whole new generation of citizen scientists!

If you like Phoebe Allens, the famous Allen’s hummingbird whose comings and goings are video-recorded in a southern California yard, then you should know about The Animal Detector.

The Animal Detector is a video blog devoted to the nocturnal critters that visit the backyard of University of North Carolina developmental biologist Bob Goldstein.

One night a couple of years ago, Goldstein’s toddler son asked for a piece of cheese to leave outside for animals. The next day, the cheese had of course disappeared—but who had taken it?

To find out, Goldstein and his son rigged up an infrared-sensitive light and a motion-sensing webcam, left some pet-food “bait” in view of the lens, and went to bed. And, voilà, the next morning, they had a video of a cat stopping by for a late-night snack.

Since then, the Animal Detector has recorded the nighttime visits of birds, possums, raccoons, squirrels, a fox, and even a human (a neighbor kid; he didn’t take the bait).

Time-lapse image of the flightpaths of two pelicans. Credit: Bob Goldstein

And the Detector has branched out: Goldstein’s rig monitored a robin’s nest for three weeks, capturing the hatching, feeding, and fledging of its occupants. One week, the Detector went to the beach and recorded the flights of seagulls and pelicans. The time-lapse results, processed into a single image, are works of art.

There’s lots more to see on the blog. If you want to create your own Animal Detector, consult Goldstein’s plans, published in the February 2009 Make magazine. And let us know if you do—it would make a great post for your Member Blog. I’m definitely going to set one up.

Einstein@Home analyzes data from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. Credit: Cornell University

Our pal, Elsa Youngsteadt, at Sigma Xi (one of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world) asked us to invite you to participate in an online conversation taking place right now over at The World: Science.

Elsa co-produces the popular science podcast for The World, a daily international news magazine broadcast on public radio stations across the United States.

Some of her most interesting subjects extend beyond the podcast to online forums. One such example includes the physicists who run Einstein@home: Bruce Allen and Benjamin Knispel, from the Max Planck Institute of Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. Einstein@Home asks volunteers to donate their computers’ idle time to search for gravitational waves and new astronomical objects. Recently, three of their volunteer citizen scientists were credited with discovering a new pulsar!

From The World: Science website:

In a study published in the journal Science this week, the scientists report Einstein@Home’s first discovery – a pulsar, some 17,000 light years from Earth. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars (leftover cores of dead giant stars). They spin rapidly and emit pulses of electromagnetic radiation. Those radio waves are picked up by radio telescopes like the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which was used in this study.”

Elsa, Bruce, and Benjamin are participating in an online science forum, hosted by The World: Science, and they want to share with you information on how scientists are working with citizen scientists–and their computers – to make discoveries in space. (You’ll also find more details about the pulsar discovery–it’s a rare type called a “disrupted recycled pulsar.”)

They also want to hear from you. Do you participate in distributed computing projects? Care to share your experience? Is there anything you would like to ask Bruce and Benjamin?

If you’d like to participate, simply visit the Volunteer Computing online forum. But do it soon. This forum ends August 25th.

And if you learn something the ScienceForCitizens.net community might find interesting, be sure to tell us about it on your Sci4Cits member blog.

International Observe the Moon Night: September 18, 2010

You are cordially invited to what might be called a worldwide moon-up.

September 18 is International Observe the Moon Night, when, if the program’s organizers get their wish, people all over the world will collectively gaze up and admire the dry seas, mountain peaks, fields of rubble, and, of course, the craters of our planet’s closest celestial companion.

When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty amazing that we can look so directly into the face of another object in our solar system. Just a naked-eye view can be plenty dramatic. Add binoculars or a basic telescope, and suddenly you feel as if you’re hovering a few thousand feet over a stark and stunning extraterrestrial landscape. If you’ve never seen the moon this way, you owe it to yourself to find a viewing party on September 18.

As astronomy wonks know, it’s no accident that this event is scheduled for a night when the moon will be in “waxing gibbous” phase. At that time, the angle of the sun’s rays and the position of the “terminator,” the line that marks the transition from moon day to moon night, will make lunar features easy to pick out.

At a recent meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, NASA’s Brooke Hsu described the upcoming lunar meet-up as an extension of a much smaller event that she helped organize last year. Following the success of two lunar missions (the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), NASA’s Ames Research Center in northern California and its Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland hosted simultaneous moon-watching parties in July 2009. The events went so well that plans were made to repeat them this year and to add a few more U.S. locations.

But then organizations all over the world got wind of the news and asked if they could join in. The momentum was irresistible, said Hsu, so International Observe the Moon Day was rushed into production by popular demand.

Want to set up your own moon-viewing party for September 18? The program ’s website provides advice, complete with templates for flyers and postcards to publicize the gatherings and a guide to help observers identify lunar features. Or you can search an interactive map for an observing event near you. The site also describes plans for a photo contest, live webcasting of public lectures, and other activities.

There’s even a line of observe-the-moon goodies to help commemorate the night: T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles. And, oh yes, beach bags, perfect for a September visit to the sea—whether it be terrestrial or lunar.

Keep an eye out for turtles crossing roads in Massachusetts. Photo: Linking Landscapes for Massachusetts Wildlfie

A recent bike ride took me past a dead buck lying by the side the road – a testament to the dangers faced by both animals and people as we continue to build out our roadways. A few miles later, after noticing the remains of a couple of unfortunate squirrel-car encounters, I started to wonder whether any scientific or government body keeps track of this kind of thing.

The short answer is yes. Though animal mortality on roadways (a.k.a. roadkill) hasn’t often been the subject of rigorous scientific study, the Linking Landscapes project in Massachusetts aims to do just that by enlisting citizen scientists to document roadkill on the state’s highways. In particular, these researchers need the help of citizen scientists to spot squashed salamanders and turtles, as well as other roadkill in Massachusetts. The goal of Linking Landscapes is to improve Massachusetts roadway safety for both animals and humans, and to collect data that may aid in planning new motorways that will have less impact on animal migrations.

Other scientists use roadkill as a teaching tool. For the past 17 years, high school science teacher Brewster Bartlett (”Dr. Splatt”) has been monitoring roadkill – and encouraging his students to do so as well. His program, Project RoadKill, aims to teach students about the animals found in their community, and to increase awareness about the hazards of motor vehicles with respect to wildlife. Those citizen scientists who want to participate in Project Roadkill can sign up here.

So, for all of you interested in the messier side of biology, keep an eye out for incidents of roadkill and report what you find!

A folded-up protein.

The child you scold for spending so much time on World of Warcraft? That kid could turn out to be a biochemist’s dream.

According to University of Washington researchers who run an online game—sorry—an online science project called Foldit, players can beat computer algorithms at solving one of science’s toughest problems: How to fold a protein.

Proteins, which are composed of long strings of amino acids, won’t work properly unless they are balled up in a stable 3D shape. There are thousands of ways a given protein can fold, but only one structure that allows the protein to function. Knowing a protein’s shape is critical to understanding the processes it’s involved in and to designing new drugs. Until recently, scientists simply allowed computer software to chug along endlessly, working out likely possibilities for each protein’s shape.

But in 2008, Seth Cooper, David Baker, and others at the University of Washington decided to see if citizen scientists could do better than computers. They created Foldit, a multiplayer online game that pits volunteers against each other to see who can manipulate proteins into their most stable configuration.

Foldit has all the perks and prods of any good online game: a point system, skill levels, chat rooms, wikis, and tools with names like “shake,” “wiggle,” and “rubber band.” The “game” takes advantage of three traits humans have and computers lack: superior spatial awareness, the willingness to take short-term risks for long-term gains, and the ability to recognize a dead-end. So far, more than 57,000 human folders have joined in.

And it looks like they’re winning. In a recent study, the Washington researchers matched the players against the state-of-the-art protein-folding computer program, testing them on 10 proteins whose structures were known but had not been made public. The top-ranked gamers bested the software in five cases, matched it in three, and lost only twice. Unlike the computer, the players took risks, temporarily de-stabilizing the protein in order to end up with a better structure.

On August 5, the gamers scored in a different kind of game when Nature published the researchers’ report about the protein-folders’ prowess. At the end of the list of authors, there they were: “Foldit players.”