Before participating in a citizen science project, I had absolutely no idea what it was. I thought it was going to be an extremely time consuming process, something those only really interested in science could enjoy. I was wrong. It turns out; citizen science projects are actually pretty cool. As I was finding a study to participate in, I passed by a lot of really interesting ones, from a study which seeks to understand how people classify TV theme songs to a project that maps the DNA of thousands of people in order to trace a common ancestor. Since these were either over or expensive to participate in ($40 for the DNA kit), I chose Citizen Sort.

Citizen Sort is a project created by students and staff at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. It was created in order to help scientists classify different species of animals, plants, and insects. When I participated, I helped classify moths, sharks, and stingrays. I did this through a modified memory game but instead of matching the same picture together, I matched pictures of organisms to the category they fit.

For example, I would have pictures of different moths and I would have to put the moths into whatever category they fit into. This reminded me of when we used to classify rocks in my high school earth science class. It was fun and usually pretty easy. It was actually harder than I thought it would be, originally, since some of the pictures are hard to see the differences between the different organisms or place them into a specific category. I did the best matching with moths at a 90% correct level overall. Sharks, I just couldn’t get. The best score I got was 40%. It was harder to tell the difference between sharks than moths and the categories were much more specific.

I ran into some pretty terrifying looking sharks too. Look at this guy; he’s straight out of Jurassic Park. Damn nature, you scary!

Overall, I had a lot of fun on my project. I spent a couple hours just playing around and trying to beat my previous scores. It’s awesome that a game can actually help scientists in the real world. If the internet is good for something, this is it. It’s awesome that anyone can participate in science experiments just by playing an online game. This is a really interesting approach to studying the sciences and I think this could definitely help younger kids get interested in science and actually learn from playing games. Overall, I was very happy with my citizen science project and I hope to participate more in the future.