Citizen Science in Education: Students Becoming Cell Biology Researchers

Success stories of Citizen Science projects demonstrates how valuable is this open science paradigm and encourages organizations to shift towards new ways of doing research different to the traditional ones. While benefits for... [ view full abstract ]

Success stories of Citizen Science projects demonstrates how valuable is this open science paradigm and encourages organizations to shift towards new ways of doing research different to the traditional ones. While benefits for researchers are clear, outcomes for individuals participating in those kind of projects are not that easy to assess. One of the reasons that makes that difficult to evaluate such outcomes is the wide spectrum of volunteers collaborating on those projects. Focusing on a segment of that spectrum may help to identify its particular outcomes. Given the strong links between science and education, that one seems an interesting section of volunteer population to be studied.
In this work, we present an experience with students who participate in a project on cell biology research. More than 4500 students from various grades before high school of two different countries have collaborated so far with the analysis of around 50000 cell images. Beyond introducing the experiment and resources involved, we aim to provide an overview of the benefits of integrating Citizen Science in Education and what students may obtain from it. In this case, besides improving their background on biotechnology, some other types of informal learning have been observed in addition to the feeling of playing a key role what means an increase of their motivation.