Are you looking for a Zooniverse project in a language other than English? Here is the latest update on what is available, as of 1 July 2025. Many thanks to our amazing volunteers who contributed.
By the way, anyone can become a translator on Zooniverse. Here is how.
This list of translated Zooniverse projects is prepared by Sallyann Chesson.
All Zooniverse projects are created in English. But many of them are available in different languages – from Armenian and Chinese to Korean and Hungarian. Here is the latest list of translated projects.
The truth is, everyone can become a translator on Zooniverse! But how do you do that? We talked with some of our amazing volunteers who helped various research teams to translate their projects, and here is what we’ve learned.
Jiří Podhorecký (@trendspotter) lives in Cesky Krumov, a small beautiful town in the Czech Republic. He works in tourism and spends most of his free time supporting various IT projects focusing on ecology, nature conservation and virtual volunteering. Translating the Zooniverse platform and projects into Czech is one of these projects.
InoSenpai (イノ先輩) is a citizen scientist in her 20s in Japan. She studied astronomy in college, but now has another job. She has translated more than 30 Zooniverse space projects into Japanese and she even created a blog in order to introduce them to the Japanese people.
Aarush Naskar (@Sunray_2013) from India is the youngest translator on Zooniverse! He is an amateur astronomer. Story writing, sky watching, reading and coding are his main interests.
Jason Richye is an international student from Indonesia. He is 18 years old and is a business major student. His hobbies are playing basketball, listening to music and watching movies, especially action, comedy and horror.
Louis Verhaeghe (@veragon) is a young French electrical technician passionate about astronomy and astrophysics. As an amateur astronomer, he loves immersing himself in the vastness of the universe and gaining a deeper understanding of what surrounds us. In September 2024, he reached a major milestone: more than 50 projects fully translated into French!
Jiří: “I wish that once in the future the whole Zooniverse was available to people in my language. I think that there is a huge and untapped potential in people of all ages, but especially in young people, to build a positive relationship with the world around us and to contribute to it in some way. Citizen science can be an enjoyable and unencumbered contribution to the community that will eventually process this citizen science into real science.”
イノ先輩: “Since Zooniverse is not well known in Japan, I am currently working as a Japanese translator for a number of projects to create a foundation for Japanese users to participate in Zooniverse without feeling any barriers.”
Aarush: ”I was attending a citizen science seminar hosted by the Kolkata Astronomy Club, which my father is the co-founder of, so naturally, I was also a part of it, when I heard about a boy who translated Einstein@Home: Pulsar Seekers to Bengali, so I decided to translate projects to Hindi. I know both Hindi and Bengali, but I am more comfortable with Hindi in terms of writing. It also motivated me that if I translated projects, more people would be able to do them. I also did it thinking I would know more Hindi words.”
Jason: “I’ve always wanted to be part of a research project and contribute in a meaningful way, even in a small role. When I saw one of the translation projects last winter in 2024, I remember feeling genuinely excited. I thought, “This is something I could actually help with.” So when I had the chance to volunteer, I was happy to be involved. Translating made me feel like I was part of something bigger, helping bridge gaps and support the research in a real, practical way.”
Louis (@veragon): “I have been contributing to the Zooniverse platform for almost nine years now. Initially, between 2017 and 2019, I focused exclusively on classifying images and scientific data. In fact, I have surpassed 12,900 classifications! But in late 2019, as my English improved, I asked myself: why not translate projects into French? This would allow more French speakers to get involved in citizen science and contribute to various research initiatives.
It is an immense source of pride for me to contribute, in my own way, to making science more accessible. It is important for me to translate these projects because science should be open to everyone. Many research projects rely on public participation, but the language barrier can be a major obstacle. By translating these projects, I enable thousands of people who are not fluent in English to contribute to scientific research. And the more participants there are, the more high-quality data researchers can gather. It’s a virtuous cycle!”
Aarush: “It is funny that I make a lot (not that many!) mistakes when writing Hindi in real life but I make only some mistakes while translating.”
Jiří: “Fortunately for me, the process is already quite easy, not least because information technology helps us all to get in touch today. The enriching part is always the beginning, when you need to dig into the philosophy of the project and understand how best to use language to express yourself accurately.”
イノ先輩: “I love astronomy, but it has been difficult to love and have knowledge of all of this entire broad field equally. I have always been interested in the classification of light curves of variable stars and how to read radar observation data of meteors, but I had avoided them because they seemed difficult, but I was able to learn them in one week through translation.
The process of grasping all of that content in one’s own brain, reconstructing it in one’s native language, and outputting it is far more effective than simply reading and learning.”
イノ先輩: “It is not only the light side of the researcher that we see when we do translations. Unfortunately, we also encounter projects that have been abandoned due to lack of bearers.
Behind this may be issues such as the reality of researchers being chronically overworked and the instability of their posts. But it is not only the beautiful and exciting top part, but also the glimpse into a part of the research project that makes us realize that we are not customers or students, but co-members of the project.”
Jiří: “Citizen science knows no boundaries! You can be all over the world. And it will give you back a strong sense of meaningful help, usefulness, confidence and joy.”
Jason: “You don’t need to be an expert to make a difference.”
Louis: “Together, we can make science more accessible and understandable for everyone. Every contribution matters, and the more of us there are, the greater our impact!”
Jason: “Take your time, ask questions, and focus on clarity. It’s a fun way to learn and be part of something meaningful.”
イノ先輩: “Add a bit of playfulness to your project title when you rewrite it in your native language! Mix in parodies and phrases that are unique to the respective cultures of each linguistic area, but only to the extent that they do not detract from the essence of the project. The title of the project may be the reason why some people are interested in it.”
Louis: “If you believe you have a good enough understanding of the languages you’re translating, then go for it! Reach out to various projects that haven’t been translated into your language and offer to translate them. Help us make science more accessible to the entire world!”
Jiří: “Your translation will make it easier for people who may know a foreign language, but whose native language is still closest to them. Without it, they would hardly, if ever, know about the Zooniverse. Oddly enough, language and territorial barriers sometimes serve more as a tool to better divide society. Don’t give up and bring foreign ideas, experience and science to people who need to learn about it in their own language.”
Louis: “I started my first translations by directly reaching out to project leaders and offering to translate their projects into French. Over time, I learned how to use Zooniverse’s translation tool, which turned out to be quite intuitive. This approach allowed me to better understand the process and refine my working method.”
Then you should definitely try it! Here is how:
1. Choose the project you would like to translate
2. Send a message to one of the research team members (privately or on their Talk)*
3. They can then assign you the Translator role
4. After that, you can log into the Zooniverse translation interface and start translating!
5. When you are done, let the team know and they will activate your translation to be visible for everyone on Zooniverse!
*An example of a message: “Hello! I’ve enjoyed working on your project (title) and would love to help translate it into (language). Do you think it could be useful? If so, please assign me the Translator role and I will give it a try!”
Are you a researcher looking to set up translations for your project? Please read these instructions. Contact us at contact@zooniverse.org if you need additional support. Please note that the Zooniverse team cannot recommend volunteers translators for your project.
Highlights
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a powerful new facility high in the dry Chilean mountains. Today, on 23 June 2025, for the first time, it is releasing images from its Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera. At 3200 megapixels, this largest camera ever built will allow us to see the universe in a new way. And with Zooniverse, everyone can join and help with discoveries!
Read on to learn more.
The first images from the NSF–DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory, our new eye on the sky based high in the Chilean desert, have been released today. The culmination of more than a decade of effort by a team of engineers and scientists, these glimpses of what this new instrument is capable of mark the start of a new way of viewing the sky – and Zooniverse will be a significant part of it. The Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will start soon, producing data at a scale that means the efforts of volunteers to sort through it and make discoveries will be invaluable.
The images featured in today’s ‘First look’ event were taken by the observatory’s mighty LSSTCam, the instrument which will be the observatory’s workhorse for the next decade and at 3200 megapixels the largest ever built, will manage. They provide a glimpse into the new survey’s ability to catch the changing sky, tracking millions of new asteroids and discovering thousands of supernovae, as well as more exotic and hopefully unexpected events.
These images are a significant milestone, and all of us at Zooniverse congratulate our partners in the international LSST collaboration on getting here. In the near future – hopefully in just a few days – scientists will get their hands on a first tranche of testing data and, because Zooniverse is a core part of their plans, we should expect to see the first citizen science projects launch shortly thereafter. Once the survey itself gets going later in the year, and when the first of the annual data releases happens next year, we should see a steady flow of Rubin data in Zooniverse projects old or new.
Whenever astronomers have found a new way of looking at the sky, and thereby opened up a new window on the Universe, we’ve been surprised. A survey of the whole sky, carried out with a telescope that’s the equal of any in the world, and with an immensely sophisticated camera and software pipeline to match, definitely counts. Join us in this first look at the Rubin Observatory sky – and then hang on. We’re all on what looks set to be a fantastic, decade long voyage of discovery.
Find your project on Zooniverse: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects
Learn more about us and stay in touch: https://linktr.ee/the.zooniverse
In this edition of Who’s who in the Zoo, meet Ameenat Lola Solebo who leads Eyes on Eyes ; a Zooniverse project that aims to improve how we monitor children with a blinding eye disorder.
Who: Ameenat Lola Solebo, Clinician Scientist (Paediatric Ophthalmology / Epidemiology & Health Data Science)
Location: UCL GOS Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital
Zooniverse project: Eyes on Eyes
What is your research about?
We’re asking Zooniverse volunteers to label eye images of children with or at risk of a blinding disease called uveitis. Early detection of uveitis means less chance of blindness, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for children to access the specialised experts they need to detect uveitis at an early stage (before the uveitis has caused damage in side the eye). New ‘OCT’ (eye cameras) may provide detailed enough images of the eye to allow even non specialists to detect uveitis at the early stages. Our research studies develop and evaluate OCT methods for uveitis detection and monitoring in children, and during these studies we collect a lot of data from children’s eyes – sometimes several hundred scans in different positions just from one child. We are hoping that we don’t need to keep on collecting this many images in the long run, but we have to know where and how best to look for problems.
How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research?
Zooniverse volunteers are asked to label scans in different ways. They can tell us what they think of the quality of an individual scan – is it good enough to be useful? They can point out which features of the scan are making it poorer quality so that we can judge how useful it might be. They can draw regions of interest on the scan, helping to focus attention. They can also pick up the signs of uveitis – inflammatory cells floating around in the usually dark space inside the eye, looking like bright stars in a dark sky. They can tell us if they can see cells, how many cells they can see, and they can locate each cell for us. The quality judgements submitted by the volunteers have compared favourably to expert judgement, which is great. We have since developed a quality assessment algorithm based on labels from the Zooniverse volunteers. We are now looking to just how accurate the volunteer assessments of the images are compared to the clinical diagnosis of the child.
What’s a surprising fact about your research field?
Uveitis is often autoimmune, meaning your body turns against the delicate tissues in your eye — especially the uvea, a highly vascular layer that includes the iris. It’s like friendly fire… which is such an awful term, isn’t it?
What first got you interested in research?
I was tired of answering “we don’t know” when parents asked us questions about their child’s eye disease.
What’s something people might not expect about your job or daily routine?
Someone asked me how I put back the eye after doing eye surgery – ophthalmic surgeons do not, I repeat do not remove the eye from patients to operate on them! Also – I think that people may be surprised about how beautiful the eye looks when viewed at high mag. Ophthalmologists use a microscope called a slit lamp to look at and into a patient’s eye. The globe is such a fragile, well constructed, almost mystical body part, and vision is practically magic!
Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing?
I recently started karate. I am by far the oldest white belt and I am really loving making the KIAI! noises.
What are you favourite citizen science projects?
The Etch A Cell projects, because I learnt so much how to run my own project from that team and Black hole hunters, because they are great at describing what they have done with volunteer data.
What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?
Do it! And do it on Zooniverse, because the community is super engaged and the back of house team are so supportive. Stay active on talk boards to engage volunteers. And test, refine, test, refine your project until you start seeing it in your sleep.
And finally…
Thank you to all the volunteers who have been helping us!
We are happy to announce that Zooniverse’s project proposal – Neuro(Minorities)Science working group – has been selected for the IMPETUS accelerator funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101058677. This means that Zooniverse Neurodiversity Task Force can now continue its important work.
From June 2025 through January 2026, we will facilitate an online working group of neurodivergent citizen scientists and allies. Together, we will brainstorm, create and publish accessibility guidelines to empower people with all kinds of brains to participate more comfortably in crowdsourced research.
We encourage you to join this new online working group if you:
Sign up now (1 minute): https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?SUBED1=NEUROMINORITIES&A=1
Join the first brainstorming session (5-10 minutes, open until 1 July 2025): https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/oxford/neuro-minorities-science-survey-1
Please note that, for this call, we welcome participants from all online citizen science projects, not only Zooniverse. All active contributors will be acknowledged in the resulting publication.
No special knowledge is needed. All work is virtual and asynchronous. We are looking forward to working with you all on this important cause!
More information and FAQ: https://apreleva.com/neuro-minorities-science
Join discussion on Talk: https://www.zooniverse.org/talk/2354/3388012?comment=6042593
Questions can be addressed to neurodiverse@zooniverse.org
Highlights
As ML/AI has become more prevalent—now in about ⅓ of Zooniverse projects—it has sparked a range of reactions on the Talk message boards within the participant community, reflecting broader societal discourse. Zooniverse participants have surfaced concerns and insights on issues like ownership, agency, transparency, and trust. It is crucial to address the risks, opportunities, challenges, and broader ethical questions.
In response, we developed a project to create a set of recommendations for running ML/AI-engaged projects on the Zooniverse platform. In this project we will explore the tensions of integrating ML/AI within online public-engaged research. We hope that these recommendations will also be useful for related fields incorporating ML/AI in public-engaged research processes.
With funding from The Kavli Foundation, this project will bring together Zooniverse leadership, platform participants, researchers, and experts in topics like communications, ethics, law, and ML/AI in a series of workshops and working sessions. The project deepens partnerships among Zooniverse and its participant community, as well as the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, UC-Berkeley Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, and the SkAI AI Astro Institute.
Workshop themes cover topics raised by Zooniverse participants and project research teams as well as gaps in existing knowledge, resources, and guidance.
Zooniverse participants have an opportunity to get involved and follow along in a number of ways:
1. Help shape the future of ML/AI and public-engaged research. Options include:
2. Follow along:
Who is running this study? The Project Director is Dr. Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse Co-Director and Digital Humanities Lead.
Who is funding this research? This research is funded by the Kavli Foundation.
How can I contact the team? Questions can be addressed to hillary@zooniverse.org or samantha@zooniverse.org
Ever wondered what a Herbig-Haro object is? Find out in our latest edition of Who’s who in the Zoo with Dr. Travis Rector!
Who: Dr. Travis Rector, Professor
Location: University of Alaska Anchorage
Zooniverse project: Baby Star Search
What is your research about?
We are looking for Herbig-Haro (HH) objects, which are jets of gas produced by newly-forming protostars. They are important because they can show us where stars are forming right now. HH objects are quite beautiful and rare – only about a thousand of them are known to exist!
How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research?
We are searching for HH objects in giant clouds of gas inside our galaxy using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile. The images produced by this camera are huge – 570 megapixels each – and are too big for a single person to look at. That’s where Zooniverse came in. We divided each image into smaller, 512×512, “cutouts” for people to search. We’ve completed the analysis and Zooniverse volunteers found 169 new HH objects! Considering only about 1200 were known to exist before this is a big increase.
What’s a surprising or fun fact about your research field?
Jets of gas occur in our universe on a wide range of scales. All of them are produced when gas is swirling around a central object. In the case of Herbig-Haro objects the jets are produced by gas moving around a protostar. These jets can extend over several light years. Jets are also produced by gas swirling around black holes. In quasars, these jets are powered by “supermassive” black holes and the jets produced can extend for several hundred thousand light years. What’s amazing is how similar all these jets are to each other despite the tremendous differences in size.
What first got you interested in research?
I first started doing research on quasar jets with Dr. David Hough when I was an undergraduate student at Trinity University.
What’s something people might not expect about your job or daily routine?
People often imagine that astronomers sit inside a dome every night looking through a telescope. In reality the telescopes we use have digital cameras and instruments that collect the data. Nowadays we can operate most telescopes remotely. So most of my research right now is done with telescopes in Chile that I can operate with my laptop computer from the comfort of my kitchen!
Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing?
One of my hobbies is turning the data we get from our telescopes into color images. They’re a great way to share the beauty of the universe, and share the research that we do. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and most of these images are available in the NOIRLab image gallery. Living in Alaska I love to do a wide range of outdoor activities, but my passion is for snow. In particular I love to cross-country ski.
What are you favourite citizen science projects?
For years I’ve had my students to the Planet Hunters TESS project.
What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?
It was a lot easier than I had imagined it would be to set up. Zooniverse is great about helping out, and beta testers also had a lot of important feedback. Once your project is up and running be prepared for a tsunami of enthusiastic volunteers who will have a lot of questions. We also had several volunteers to translate our project into other languages, which was great for increasing participation.
And finally…
Here’s one of our color images of one of the regions we studied looking for Herbig Haro objects (you can read more about this here).
As the U.S. Congress deliberates on next year’s budget, proposed 50% cuts to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the deeply concerning layoffs at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), jeopardize the work of organizations like Zooniverse that rely on federal funding.
Although Zooniverse is an international collaboration, with core institutional partners in both the U.S. and the UK, this post focuses on the vital role that U.S. federal support has played in enabling our impact. As these funding decisions are made, we wanted to share how essential this support has been to Zooniverse’s impact on research and public engagement.
Zooniverse welcomes millions of people into the research process each year, lifting the veil on how science works and building bridges between the public and research. Volunteer efforts on Zooniverse have helped discover planets around distant stars, advance our understanding of wildlife populations, preserve human history, and much more.
From the start, federal grants have been a cornerstone of Zooniverse’s ability to innovate and scale. A seed grant from the NSF in 2009 helped us explore the integration of machine learning with participatory science, work that laid the foundation for Zooniverse to become one of the world’s most sophisticated platforms for AI-enhanced crowdsourced research. A grant from IMLS advanced our Digital Humanities efforts, and a follow-on NEH grant enabled us to build critical infrastructure, like our ALICE system, for reviewing and editing transcriptions across humanities projects. Most recently, support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) enabled a new initiative to render three-dimensional subjects within Zooniverse, expanding the platform’s capabilities to advance biomedical research.
Federal support has also been instrumental in strengthening Zooniverse’s public impacts, from an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant that led to the creation of classroom.zooniverse.org to an NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) grant that launched a multi-person Galaxy Zoo touch table exhibit at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. This hands-on experience reaches tens of thousands of visitors each year and often serves as the first entry point for children and their families into the world of participatory science.
Crucially, these federal grants don’t just fund abstract ideas or technologies, they fund people. Federal support helps pay the salaries of the software engineers, researchers, and participatory science professionals who build and maintain the Zooniverse platform, collaborate with research teams, and support our community of nearly 3 million volunteers.
Our current NASA grant, for example, enables over two dozen NASA research teams to unlock their datasets through Zooniverse and funds core platform maintenance efforts, an area of support notoriously difficult to secure. Our NASA grant also allowed us to respond directly to community needs through the implementation of new Group Engagement features and student service hours support, among the most requested tools from educators, classrooms, museums, and others using Zooniverse in group settings around the world.
Today, Zooniverse is part of the core infrastructure of research and scholarship. We partner with more than 150 research institutions and nearly 3 million volunteers worldwide. Our platform is a critical tool in the modern researcher’s toolkit, including in fields relying on human-in-the-loop AI methods to analyze vast datasets. At the same time, we are a trusted platform for public engagement, helping build confidence in science and fostering a sense of shared purpose across disciplines, borders, and backgrounds.
Like many research and public engagement organizations, Zooniverse has deeply benefitted from federal grant support. We felt it was important to share with our communities just how vital this support has been. Much of what we’ve built — our infrastructure, partnerships, and public-facing tools — would not have been possible without it. Continued federal investment remains critical to sustaining and growing this work.
We are incredibly grateful to the many individuals who volunteer through Zooniverse to fulfill service hour requirements for graduation, scholarships, and more. This is a fantastic way to meet your requirements while contributing to significant research and discoveries, helping teams worldwide better understand ourselves and the universe.
Below are instructions for participants (students), followed by instructions for Organization Leads supporting students in these efforts.
Contact your organization to see if participating in Zooniverse can fulfill your volunteering or other participation requirements. A good approach is to share this blog post with your organization so they understand what you will do and how you will document your participation. We strongly recommend checking with your organization before you start to ensure your efforts are recognized.
Create a Zooniverse account by clicking ‘Register’ in the upper-right corner of the Zooniverse.org homepage. Only your name and email are captured, and we do not share email addresses outside of Zooniverse.
Note: Registration is not required to participate in Zooniverse, but it is useful in this case to create a volunteer certificate documenting the number of hours you spent classifying and the number of classifications you did. Volunteer certificates are often required documentation for service learning hours.
Dive into any project and start classifying! There are typically over 80 active projects listed at zooniverse.org/projects. You can filter by different disciplines (history, space, nature, climate, etc.) to find projects that align with your interests. Every project’s ‘classify’ page has a brief tutorial to guide you on what to do and how to do it.
Be sure to be logged in while you participate so that your stats and hours of participation are recorded and can be included in your certificate.
Go to zooniverse.org, sign in, and click ‘More Stats’. Use the drop-down options on the upper-right of the stats bar cart to filter to a specific time period and/or project of interest. Then click on ‘Generate Volunteer Certificate’ (the button to the bottom-right of your stats bar chart).
Share your Certificate with your Organization. We’d love it if you continue participating!
By following these steps, you can fulfill your service hour requirements while making meaningful contributions to scientific research. Happy classifying!
For details on how hours are calculated, please see notes at the bottom of this post.
When sharing this opportunity with your volunteer community, we recommend emphasizing the benefits volunteers gain beyond just contributing time and classifications. Instead of creating busy work, encourage participants to reflect on how their efforts (and the community’s collective efforts) contribute to our understanding of the world and the broader universe.
Watch this brief introduction and video for more context about the Zooniverse, the world’s largest platform for people-powered research, with dozens of active projects and millions of participants worldwide.
Each Zooniverse project is led by a different research team, covering a wide range of subjects:
The collective efforts of Zooniverse projects have resulted in hundreds of research publications to date.
Share the instructions above for the simple steps on how to participate and generate a certificate.
If you need to reference a 501(c)(3): Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, one of the hosts of the Zooniverse Team, is a 501(c)(3). Organizations that need to link explicitly to a 501(c)(3) for their volunteering efforts use the Adler Planetarium as the reference. Documentation of the Adler Planetarium’s 501(c)(3) status is provided here. Note: Zooniverse is a program within Adler, Oxford, and the University of Minnesota; it is not a 501(c)3 of its own.
If you’re interested in tracking your participants’ engagement, setting group goals, and more easily telling your story of collective impact, check out this blog post for details and instructions.
We’d love to hear about your experience and share your stories of impact with the broader Zooniverse community to spark ideas and inspiration in others. See this Daily Zooniverse post as an example. Email us at contact@zooniverse.org with your stories, and don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions or need additional information.
By following these steps, you can include Zooniverse in your volunteer opportunities and help your participants fulfill their service hour requirements while making meaningful contributions to scientific research. Thank you for including Zooniverse in your offerings!
The hours displayed in the personal stats page are calculated based on the start and end times of your classification efforts. Hours posted there do not reflect time spent on Talk. Talk-based effort is deeply valued and important for Zooniverse projects – it’s where community is built and where many critical discoveries across the disciplines have been made. But within the scope of this phase of developing the new stats and group pages, we only built out views for hours spent classifying.
A little more detail on how the classification time is calculated. Over the years, Zooniverse has updated its infrastructure for robustness and sustainability. In 2015, we built and launched onto our current infrastructure, ‘Panoptes’, and its associated database. At that time in 2015, we started recording both the start and end times for each classification. This means that for all classifications 2015 and beyond, the calculation for time spent on each classification is a straightforward subtraction: finished_at – started_at. We then add up all these values to get the number of hours you’ve spent classifying.
When we made the choice to use the simple ‘finished_at – started_at’ we knew that that could lead to an overestimate of time spent classifying (i.e., you might step away from your computer after starting a classification and then come back to it later). We wanted to keep things as simple as possible and we didn’t want to make assumptions about what someone is doing during the time between ‘finished_at’ and ‘started_at’. We also preferred to err on the side of overestimating rather than underestimating – we’re just so grateful for people’s participation and want to celebrate that.
We do set a 3-hour cap on a single classification to mitigate the impact of ‘stepping away’ on the calculation of your stats. Volunteer tasks on Zooniverse vary widely in complexity—some are quick, like answering yes/no questions, while others, like detailed transcriptions, take more time. Analyzing classification durations across projects, we found that most average between 0–30 minutes, some exceed 30 minutes, with the longest averaging over 3 hours. We ran simulations testing different caps, from 15 minutes to 20 hours, discussed the findings, and decided on a 3-hour cap to fairly credit longer tasks while reducing the impact of idle time.
If your program requires that you list contact information for the Zooniverse, please use the following:
Dr. Laura Trouille, Zooniverse Principal Investigator, Adler Planetarium, 1300 South DuSable Lake Shore Dr., Chicago, IL 60605, contact@zooniverse.org
Again, please keep in mind that we unfortunately do not have the capacity to fill out and/or sign individual forms. If your organization is not able to use the automatically generated signed Volunteer Certificate (see notes above), best to find an alternate volunteer opportunity.
Over the years, one of the most common requests from educators has been for tools to support group engagement in Zooniverse and better tell your story of collective impact. We’re so grateful for a grant from NASA enabling us to build these new tools to meet those needs.
Whether you’re a library or museum educator, a camp counselor, or a classroom teacher, read on to discover how Zooniverse can enhance your educational goals.
Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research, with millions of participants and dozens of active projects across various disciplines. By using Zooniverse, you join a global network of educators offering students often their first opportunity to engage in real research. From classifying galaxies and tagging penguins to transcribing historic documents and marking the structure of cells for cancer research, Zooniverse projects span a wide array of research fields.
For a list of curricular resources for educators, including lesson plans, instructor guides, and more, check out zooniverse.org/get-involved/education.
Zooniverse offers easy ways to track both individual and collective impact, making it easy to use in educational settings. You can assign tasks, motivate participation, set up friendly competitions between classes, and more.
When logged into Zooniverse, each individual sees their own stats, including classification counts and hours spent. A valuable feature for fulfilling service hour requirements is the ability to generate a signed volunteer certificate.
Groups in Zooniverse can view their collective impact, set shared goals, and celebrate milestones. These tools empower educators to engage students in new ways.
Go to zooniverse.org, sign in, and scroll down to ‘My Groups’. Click ‘Create New Group.’ Name your group appropriately, such as “Hammond’s 4th Period Biology” or “Davis County Public Library.”
As the admin, you can decide if the group stats page will be publicly viewable or only accessible to group members. Additionally, you can choose whether to display individual stats or only aggregate results. For example, if your group stats page is public, you can set it so that only you can see individual stats, or you can allow other group members or everyone to see them. Through the admin pop-up, you can update your group settings or remove group members at any time.
For additional Group details/features, see this blog post.
Have your students or program participants create a Zooniverse account by clicking ‘Register’ in the upper-right corner of zooniverse.org. To invite them to join your group, click the ‘Copy Join Link’ on your group’s page and share it via email or other preferred means, such as creating a QR code.
Once they click the join link, all classifications they do on any Zooniverse project will be included in your group stats page, contributing to your group’s collective impact.
When viewing your group stats page, you can use the drop-down options on the upper-right of the stats bar chart to filter to a specific time period and/or project of interest. Another helpful feature is the ‘See detailed stats’ option, where you can view all group contributors’ stats and generate a .CSV file for further analysis. A future feature will be the ability to filter to specific time periods within this detailed stats page.
Members of your group will also be able to view the group stats page. Depending on the choices you’ve made in the admin settings, group members will either be able to only view the aggregate stats OR they’ll be able to view both the aggregate and individual stats.
If you’ve set your group visibility settings to ‘public’, you’ll have the ‘Share Group’ option at the top of your group’s stats page. Clicking ‘Share group’ will copy a link to the public-facing view of your group’s stats page. This is different from a ‘Join Link’. Anyone with the ‘Share Group’ link will simply be able to view the group’s stats, but will not be added as a member of the group.
A few Zooniverse project teams have created short thank you videos, which are great rewards to share with your students after reaching a collective milestone.
Imagine you lead a STEM club at your local public library. You create a group, set the settings to public but only for aggregate results (i.e, not showing individual stats publicly), copy the join link, and share it with your group members. You set a classification challenge for the week, share recommended projects (see zooniverse.org/projects for the full list), and encourage free choice. Throughout the week, you update your group on progress toward your goal. At your next meeting, you celebrate reaching the goal with a thank you video and highlight top contributors with special rewards. Then, you set the next week’s challenge to keep the momentum going.
We’d love to hear about your experience and share your stories of impact with the broader Zooniverse community to spark ideas and inspiration in others. See this Daily Zooniverse post as an example. Email us at contact@zooniverse.org with your stories!
If you have questions or need advice, join the conversation in our dedicated Talk discussion forum around Education and the Zooniverse or email us at contact@zooniverse.org.
On behalf of Zooniverse, we are incredibly grateful that you choose to use participatory science in your educational programs and hope to continue fostering this innovative community of educators around the world.
Thank you for including Zooniverse in your educational efforts!
Zooniverse 