The Best Citizen Science Projects on the Internet (Part 1)

April is Global Citizen Science Month, which celebrates and promotes the participation of everyday people in science. In honor of the occasion, we’ve gathered some of the best citizen science projects from around the internet. Some of these are documentation of experiments, while many others are instructions on how to build tools useful for conducting your own research.

They’re all awesome, so pour your favorite beverage into a 500ml graduated cylinder for sipping and let’s dive in!

Marb’s lab

This is a YouTube channel with a strong focus on lab experiments undertaken with DIY equipment and it is a goldmine for citizen science. In most of the videos, Marb performs known experiments. But good science relies on replication and so this work is important. And his ability to achieve that on a modest budget without expensive equipment is remarkable.

In his most recent video, for example, Marb built an Arduino-controlled device designed to produce an estimation of the value of absolute zero. It isn’t possible to actually achieve absolute zero in the real world and it is difficult to get anywhere close without spending a lot of money. That’s why Marb relied on extrapolation from more accessible temperatures measured through the controlled experiment.

Foldscope

Nothing screams “science!” quite like a microscope. They’re incredibly useful instruments for letting us peer into a world beyond normal human vision, but they’re also usually quite expensive. Foldscope is a unique paper microscope designed to be as affordable as possible. The Mini Classroom Kit costs just $38.50 and includes 20 kits, making each microscope less than $2 (before tax and shipping).

Foldscopes are perfect for introducing children to the wonders of science and the Foldscope team even created an online community, called Microcosmos, where everyone can connect and share the tiny things they’ve found. It has guides on how to use a Foldscope for examining things that are easy to find, like tardigrades (AKA “water bears”).

Measuring star brightness

So much of what we know about our universe is thanks to careful observation of the cosmos combined with very clever reasoning. You might wonder how astronomers know how far away stars are and how big they are. Afterall, we can’t circle other stars every year like we do with the Sun.

Answering those questions starts with measuring star brightness and this fun project, posted to Hackster by DFRobotEdu, will walk you through how to build a scale model to learn the process. Ultimately, it will help you understand the relationship between star magnitude, distance, and luminosity. You can tackle this project with just an Arduino UNO, an ultrasonic distance sensor, a DFRobot Gravity light sensor, one or more LEDs, and a cardboard box.

Nanometer optical measurements

Stars are literally astronomically far apart, but what about at the other end of the scale? How do you measure very small distances, such as the wavelengths of light? The visible light spectrum ranges from 380 to 700 nanometers. To put that into perspective, a human hair has a diameter of around 90,000 nanometers.

One way to measure such tiny wavelengths is with an interferometer, which relies on the physics of light as it bounces back and forth between mirrors in phase. This Instructables tutorial from Opticsfan describes how to make a Fabry–Pérot interferometer using affordable supplies, including an Arduino UNO, some binder clips, and a $250 Spectryx Blue spectrometer.

DIY low-cost spectrometer

In that last sentence, “affordable” was a relative term. Compared to the typical equipment found in labs, that Spectryx Blue is very inexpensive. But $250 is still a lot of money, so you might want to consider building your own spectrometer on a budget by following this tutorial from Technovation.

A spectrometer is an instrument that can measure the spectral properties of… something. Light is a common something and a spectrometer can tell you the strength of bands of wavelengths within the sampled light, which is useful for many tasks (as you discovered with the last project).

This DIY spectrometer only requires a USB webcam, a cardboard box with a slit, and a “refractive grate” you can make from an old DVD. Through the power of physics, the slit and refractive grate will separate the light into bands and the webcam will record those. Open-source software (programmed in Python) will then help you analyze and measure the results.

Smart Citizen Kit 2.3

A great deal of modern science relies on the collection of data—mountains upon colossal mountains of data. That’s particularly true for climate science and environmental science, as they rely on averages and trends. The temperature in your backyard isn’t very relevant to anyone but you. However, the average temperature of thousands of backyards all around the world can be very useful information.

The Smart Citizen Kit 2.3, created by Fab Lab Barcelona and Seeed Studio, is an open-source device for environmental monitoring. It has a whole suite of sensors to measure air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, noise levels, ambient light, UV light (A, B, and C), and particulate matter.

You can use your SCK 2.3 for your own purposes, but it also has WiFi connectivity and can be used to participate in larger efforts to collect environmental data.

FieldKit

FieldKit is similar to the Smart Citizen Kit 2.3, but with more of an emphasis on ruggedness and durability. There are different FieldKit models intended for monitoring water, weather, and air quality. And each has additional external sensors for expanded capability.

These devices are perfect for university student research projects and can be deployed in remote areas for extended periods of time. Instead of connecting to data networks (which tend not to be available in such locations), FieldKit devices store data onto SD cards for later analysis.

Open Flow Meter

One parameter that FieldKit Water can’t currently monitor is flow, which is very important information for geographical, geological, and ecological studies. Eben’s Open Flow Meter physically measures water speed using a DN80 sensor and an Arduino.

It is important to note that water speed only gives you one variable of the equation and that’s especially true if you only take a measurement at one point. For the best results, you’d want to measure multiple points of the river at intervals over long periods of time to detect overall trends. But that is something that any citizen scientist can do with limited resources and some spare time.

Stay tuned for part two...