The time has come to announce the winners of Grant’s Great Leaving Challenge! Many thanks to all who submitted classifications for our four featured projects over the past week. Your efforts have absolutely wowed us at the Zooniverse – not only did you meet the 100,000 classifications goal, you blew right through it. All in all, you submitted a whopping 293,692 classifications – nearly 3x our goal!

This classification challenge was a massive push forward for the projects involved, and the research teams are incredibly grateful. Grant himself was touched – he had this to say about the results of his namesake challenge:

“Over the last decade I’ve constantly been blown away by the amazing effort and commitment from Zooniverse volunteers, and yet again they have surpassed all expectations! I want to thank them for all they have done, both for this challenge, and over the entire lifetime of the project. THANK YOU!”

Here’s some data to back up just how successful this challenge was:

Figure 1. The x-axes show each day the challenge ran, while the y-axes mark the percent change in classifications from the week prior. For example, this means that for Penguin Watch, there was a 100% increase in classifications on Tuesday March 22nd compared to Tuesday March 15th.

Figure 2. Here, each plot shows the date on the x-axis and the total number of classifications for that day on the y-axis. The shaded areas indicate which days were part of the challenge, and the non-shaded white areas prior are data from the preceding week. Note that the y-axes are unequal across plots because they’ve been scaled to fit their own data.

While, in this case, I do really think the figures speak for themselves, here are some highlights:

Just two days into the challenge, daily classifications for Dingo? Bingo! more than doubled compared to one week prior. A short two days later, they reached a 300% increase from the same day the previous week. All in all, Dingo? Bingo! volunteers submitted an incredible 112,505 classifications!

Planet Hunters NGTS volunteers rode a hefty 200% increase in classifications for the first two days of the challenge. On the fifth day, they peaked at an incredible 300% increase! Overall, volunteers submitted a whopping 115,388 classifications over the course of the 6 day challenge. Remarkable!

Penguin Watch volunteers readily doubled classifications from the week prior, with a peak on the fourth day when classifications were up more than 200% from the preceding week. By the end of the challenge, volunteers had submitted a grand total of 55,787 classifications!

On day two of the challenge, Weather Rescue at Sea volunteers submitted an astonishing 350% more classifications than one week prior. On the final two days of the challenge, classifications were up by nearly 400% from the preceding week! Overall, volunteers submitted an awesome 10,012 classifications.

When pulling together this data, we were just absolutely amazed by how much effort the volunteers put into Grant’s Great Leaving Challenge. What an awesome example of the power of citizen science. From all of us at the Zooniverse and from the project teams who took part in the challenge – thank you. This has been such a fun way to send off Grant, who will be greatly missed by all!