3 December 2004
Doing science at museums:
A new opportunity for citizen science
Forrest M. Mims III
Museums are very good at informing, entertaining and educating us about science and technology. But few museums do science.
Some museums are very involved in finding and studying meteors, fossils and rare plants and animals. But most are not. They simply don’t have the funds or the staff.
Yet every day many thousands of willing science volunteers visit museums across the country. They include you and me. This untapped resource could significantly enhance a visit to a museum, while also making a contribution to science.
Citizen science was a major theme at last week’s Earth Explorer’s Institute (EEI), which is why an amateur scientist was included on the planning committee.
The EEI was sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Maryland Science Center. (See the news story in this issue of The Citizen Scientist.) It was attended by science film makers, journalists, and museum staff from across the country. Speakers included an astronaut, NASA scientists, museum directors and social scientists. Heather Smith and I represented the Society for Amateur Scientists.
My talk at the EEI proposed two goals for science museums:
1. No visitor should leave a museum without having the opportunity to do some real science.
2. At least some museum staff members should also do science.
These ideas stimulated considerable interest and discussion during the weeklong meeting. David Herring, who organized the EEI, provided important support for the idea of doing science at museums in the form of a survey whose results are shown in Fig. 2. When a cross-section of the public was asked if they would participate in doing science at a museum, an impressive 67 percent of respondents replied they would.
While staff at science centers and museums was unsure how they would pay for a citizen science program, they are seriously interested in participating in a pilot program that NASA may help sponsor.
So what kind of science might you and I be able to do during some future museum visit? The list is endless, but here are a few I proposed.
Consider inviting visitors to measure the sun’s ultraviolet rays with a handheld instrument. The visitor would then enter the time and the measurement into a keyboard. The UV intensity would appear as a new dot on a graph of the day’s UV.
This same approach can be used to measure haze, carbon dioxide and many other atmospheric parameters.
Museums could host seasonal or annual “Measure Our World” days. Some visitors would scatter across the grounds to measure the dimensions of specific trees, including the circumference of their trunks, their height and the extent of their drip lines. Other visitors would photograph lichens while still others would use museum-provided microscopes to sort and identify whatever they can find in samples of soil collected according to a carefully defined protocol.
Another activity would be to invite visitors to extricate various kinds of fossils from their matrix, and to record their dimensions and other features in a log.
The Baltimore Science Center, which hosted three days of the EEI meeting, is very close to achieving this goal, for they have an interactive exhibit in which visitors use a motorized tool to remove fossil shells from their rocky matrices. All that remains is provide a metric scale and a digital camera, so the visitor can measure and photograph the specimen. After a few months, statistics on many hundreds of specimens will be compiled.
Still another activity would be a means to measure a visitor’s reaction time to various sounds and colors generated by a simple physiological testing program. This activity could also measure a person’s ability to perform various tasks, such as the time required for a subject to use a joystick, mouse or trackball to center a dot within a circle. Before the test, the visitor would enter his or her age and sex. Over a year’s time, this simple test would yield important information about physiological response of thousands of individuals.
My favorite category is toddler science. For example, children can use crayons to color their impression of the sky’s color into a box on a giant sky calendar on a museum wall. This will provide a colorful running index of the haze conditions at the museum.
Some of the museum staff at the Earth Explorers Institute asked if data collected by visitors would be of interest to scientists. This is where museum staff and the citizen science community can take the lead. If professional scientists do not have the time or inclination to study and publish science produced by museums and their visitors, then we can do it for them!
These are some of my ideas. What are yours? Please send your ideas here, and we’ll post them in “Backscatter.” I am on the planning committee of the Earth Ex |
