It is Citizen Science Month. For science educators there are opportunities to recognize the role of citizens in your community contributing to science and perhaps to start a project that allows students to contribute to science.
The Citizen Science website offers explanations and examples, but I have several of my own (personal weather station). Recently, I have exploring the potential of Bird Buddy. My wife became interested in this product as a Kick Starter project and invested. Bird Buddy is essentially a bird feeder that contains a motion activated camera. The feeder uses wifi to connect to your phone.
Images that are shared with you are also sent to Bird Buddy and the company uses AI to attempt to identify the birds in the images that you capture.
In addition, Bird Buddy has initiated a project called HeartBeat that collects information about the birds photographed in different areas of the world (the device is now being sold world wide). As a participant you can access these data and view some of the photos being captured world wide.
An interesting feature of BirdBuddy is that you share images you capture with others you designate. To my knowledge educators have not taken advantage of this opportunity, but it would be possible to collect data and share images with other classrooms.
You must be logged in to post a comment.