For classics scholars, the vast number of damaged and fragmentary texts from the waste dumps of Greco-Roman Egypt has resulted in a difficult and time-consuming endeavor, with each manuscript requiring a character-by-character transcription. Words are gradually identified based on the transcribed characters and the manuscripts' linguistic characteristics. Both the discovery of new literary texts and the identification of known ones are then based on this analysis in relation to the established canon of extant Greek literature and its lexicons. Documentary texts, letters, receipts, and private accounts, are similarly assessed and identified through key terms and names. Furthermore, an immense number of detached fragments still linger, waiting to be joined with others to form a once intact text of ancient thought, both known and unknown. The data not only continues to reevaluate and assess the literature and knowledge of ancient Greece, but also illuminates the lives and culture of the multi-ethnic society of Greco-Roman Egypt.

This series looks at the Oxford Martin School's academics and how their research is making a difference to our global future. The series will be of interest to people who are concerned about the future for the planet, how civilisation will adapt to emerging problems and issues such as climate change, over population, increased urbanisation of populations and the creation of vaccines to fight against future pandemics. The Oxford Martin School academics explain their various research topics in an accessible and thoughtful way and try to find practical solutions to these issues.

Bumble Bee Watch is a Citizen Science Project provided through the partnerships of The Xerces Society, the University of Ottawa, Wildlife Preservation Canada, BeeSpotter, The Natural History Museum, London, and the Montreal Insectarium. This is a fun and interactive way that your students can contribute to the collection of scientific information about the friendly pollinator, the bumble bee! Join the team of volunteers to help track and learn!

This site is a gateway to projects involving public participants in real-world research, with hopes of fostering connections for sharing ideas and resources.

Students learn that ordinary citizens, including students like themselves, can make meaningful contributions to science through the concept of "citizen science." First, students learn some examples of ongoing citizen science projects that are common around the world, such as medical research, medication testing and donating idle computer time to perform scientific calculations. Then they explore Zooniverse, an interactive website that shows how research in areas from marine biology to astronomy leverage the power of the Internet to use the assistance of non-scientists to classify large amounts of data that is unclassifiable by machines for various reasons. To conclude, student groups act as engineering teams to brainstorm projects ideas for their own town that could benefit from community help, then design conceptual interactive websites that could organize and support the projects.

The three-hour course draws on educational concepts of rethinking higher educational practices towards complexity modelling, messiness and to bring about resistance against reductive simple systems of governance that privilege a homogenous one directional viewpoint. Citizen science as a form of digital education is explored in terms of public education and its application is extended to the area of light pollution. The author is a practising lighting designer and professor and chair of lighting design at the OWL University of Applied Sciences, Germany. This work is copyright of the author and licensed for free use by OER commons however attribution of work is required if it is re-used.

Roughly one hundred billion galaxies are scattered throughout our observable Universe, each a glorious system that might contain billions of stars. Many are remarkably beautiful, and the aim of Galaxy Zoo is to study them, assisting astronomers in attempting to understand how the galaxies we see around us formed, and what their stories can tell us about the past, present and future of our Universe as a whole. Are you an educator? Would you like to use Galaxy Zoo with a group of students? The Navigator is an interactive tool that allows groups to classify galaxies together and then investigate galaxy characteristics. Zoo Teach is where educators can share lessons, resources and that compliment the citizen science projects that are part of the Zooniverse.

The Great Sunflower Project is a great way to use Citizen Scientist's observations of bees nationwide to create an online map of the bee population with special attention given to sunflower pollinators. Your students can join the thousands of volunteers to gather pollinator information as part of this data collection. With the bee population in decline, students can actively assist in getting to the bottom of the causes of this environmental issue. There is an introductory video provided in English and Spanish by PBS, a Quick Start Guide, maps, opportunities to observe individual data, and loads of other resources to get your students outdoors and counting pollinators!

Insight is a free IOS app that was developed by Border Free Bees and Pollinator Partnerships to inspire and empower citizens including students age four and up to learn about North America's pollinators. When you join Insight Citizen Science, you become a member of this national team, participating in observation-based research. The link provided will take you to the website for more information and a how-to video. When entering the name and email information, be sure to select the Bee Cause Project as your organization.  

Scientists rely on Citizen Scientists to track the migration of the monarch butterflies as they journey north from Mexico and back again. This amazing pollinator begins its fall migration from August to November and spring migration from March to June. Students can follow migration news, see the real-time mapping of the butterfly's movements, and report their own sightings with this amazing project from the University of Wisconsin - Madison Arboretum.

This article provides an overview of scientific inquiry and how citizen science programs run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology provide opportunities for inquiry about birds.

LandTalk is a citizen science and environmental history project that documents through interviews

how local landscapes change over time. Its goal is to provide an opportunity for conversations between generations, and a chance to learn from observers about changes they have seen.

Land Talk is a great exercise to do with students of most ages. Several lesson plans, based on the Next Generation Science and Core Curriculum standards, have been developed to complement the project. While these plans target standards for specific grade levels, they are intended to be adapted to other grades and subjects.

Mapping mangroves is a project dedicated to preservation and understanding of the world's mangrove forests. Through the use of Ushahidi, an open source project that allows for users to crowdsource data, participants will report their findings.

Measure and Map Our Galaxy: The Milky Way Project needs your help looking through tens of thousands of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. By telling us what you see in this infrared data, we can better understand how stars form. The scale of this project necessitates group participation. We need the help of the public to classify the thousands of images we have on file. If all 900,000 Zooniverse members classified a few images, this project would be done in no time!

The goal of the Moon Zoo website is "to provide detailed crater counts for as much of the Moon's surface as possible." On the website, interested parties can help out with this effort by examining images of the moon's surface and providing feedback to be used by the team of researchers in charge of the Moon Zoo project. First-time visitors should click on the "How To Take Part" for a tutorial that will help determine which project they might be best suited for. Visitors who wish to take part in the project will need to register on the website, and that process only takes a few minutes. Moving on, the website has an online forum where users can trade information as well as a blog.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

On December 16, 2010, the Zooniverse launched the original Planet Hunters to enlist the public's help to search data from the NASA's Kepler spacecraft for the characteristic drop in light due to an orbiting extrasolar planets (exoplanets) crossing in front of their parent stars. Back then we didn't know what we would find. The project was a gamble on the ability of human pattern recognition to beat machines just occasionally and spot the telltale dip from a transiting planet that was missed by automated routines looking for repeating patterns. It may have been the case that no new planets were discovered and that computers had the job down to a fine art. The gamble paid off. The original Planet Hunters project discovered a bounty of unknown planet candidates and several confirmed planets, resulting from the efforts of nearly 300,000 volunteers worldwide.

This article discusses Project FeederWatch, a real-time citizen science project, and how elementary teachers can use this bird data to integrate math lessons and concepts.

Solar scientists need you! Help them spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

In this project, students will assume the role of citizen scientists—helping researchers answer questions about how dandelions acquire beneficial symbiotic microbes from different soil types. Students will collect and transplant dandelions, conduct experiments on dandelion growth and microbe growth, and then submit data to scientists at the Genomics and Microbiology Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The researchers will use these data to supplement DNA and RNA sequencing efforts. Students will receive results from the genetic analyses from a limited set of classrooms whose dandelions had previously been sequenced. By maintaining a connection with researchers, students will have an active, hands-on role in current science. Besides aiding scientists with research, students will also create their own inquiries.