Expanding on our work with Students Discover, we’re rolling out several new citizen science-based lesson plans on our Education page. Before the holidays, we released a NestWatch Lesson Plan, inspired by the long-standing citizen science project from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In the coming months, we’ll continue to release new lesson plans focused on global, long-running citizen science projects, aligned to Next Generation Science Standards.
Our goals are simple:
- Engage students in citizen science so they have opportunities to:
- Participate in authentic scientific research.
- Feel ownership over their learning.
- Be part of a growing community of citizen scientists.
- Improve scientific literacy by understanding the process of science rather than just memorizing facts or doing canned science experiments wherein we already know the results.
- Partner with educators to:
- Feel empowered to incorporate citizen science into their classroom with complete, quality, lessons available free of charge.
- Create and modify lesson plans and units related to citizen science to work with the standards that they are responsible for addressing in their curriculum.
- Embrace the unknown of authentic scientific research.
Our second lesson of this type, Starry Night: Engineering a solution to light pollution, was co-created by me, Lea Shell, and the Globe At Night team at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. To download this lesson, simply visit the lesson page, click “Request Course Packet” and fill out the short questionnaire. Once you have submitted your information the download will begin immediately.
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