You may or may not have already come across Planet Four the latest member of the Zooniverse family, our Martian project, and let’s face it Mars is hot right now. Since Curiosity Rover touched down on the surface in August of last year, after surviving Seven Minutes of Terror, through which much of the world waited with baited breath, we’ve all gone a little Mars crazy. Or is that just Zooniverse HQ?

There are a range of Mars related teaching resources out there and NASA’s wavelength is a great way to access a collection from across multiple NASA missons. However, if you’d like your students to do some real exploring, look at real data, while making a contribution to scientific research, how about letting them loose on Planet Four?

Personally I’ve dreamed of visting Mars for as long as I can remember, but in my imagination Mars was always a dusty, rocky outpost. Planet Four has totally revolutionised my vision of our nearest neighbour, the diversity of the landscape is breathtaking, inspiring and totally unexpected.

These spectacular images of the southern Martian pole were taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a great collection of education resources relating to this mission.

The task that volunteers are asked to undertake on Planet Four is fairly easy, it’s simply a case of marking fan and blotch features on that appear on the frozen carbon dioxide ice during the winter months. The size and direction of the fans are a great indication of the wind speed and direction, so measuring these will help planetary scientists better understand the climate on Mars. For more details, check out the Planet Four “About” page or the project Blog which has some great postings from the science team.

So I do wonder, would this be an interesting project to use as part of a geography lesson, perhaps to discuss some of the processes that might have occurred to create some of the features we see? Or maybe a physics lesson, where students measure the length of the fan features and discuss what wind speeds would be required to send the material that far across the surface. What assumptions would you need to make and are there any experiments you could design to recreate the patterns?

If you’ve got any idea’s please do share them here or on ZooTeach!

It probably would have been best to kick off the Zooniverse education blog with some kind of ‘welcome to Zooniverse education’ type posting, but with Snapshot Serengeti going live today I really couldn’t bring myself to write about anything else.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Snapshot Serengeti is the latest addition to the Zooniverse family, and quite possibly the most addictive project to date. There are 225 camera traps at the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania which snap three photographs every time something moves in front of them. As you can imagine, the scientists who run the camera traps, would need decades to look at all these images and computers aren’t good enough at identifying animals to rely on them to complete the task. Plus there is the additional challenge of determining what the animals are doing, humans can see that a ‘cheetah is chasing a gazelle’ in a heartbeat, no complex algorithms required!

Fortunately for us, these images make for the perfect Zooniverse project. The ecologists at the University of Minnesota Lion Project are overwhelmed with a data that is only suitable for human classification, they have important research into predator prey relationships that will be significantly advanced by these photographs being organised and classified and the photo’s are utterly brilliant!

I’m excited about Snapshot Serengeti as both the mother of small kids and as a former high school science teacher. Firstly, as a mother, I can see huge potential for a bit of family science time. My son turned four last week and we have already had a couple of sessions of identifying and counting animals and I have it on good account that @orbitingfrog has been doing the same with his three year old daughter. My son is too little to read the animal names, but I suspect he’ll soon be better than me at identifying the animals. The site works brilliantly on an ipad, so if you’re lucky enough to have one, it’s a lovely thing to get cozy on the sofa and work together to help the ecologists understand the herbivores and carnivores who live in the Serengeti. We also took a look on google maps at the location of the Serengeti and talked a little bit about the African continent, plus lots of ‘what does elephant start with?’ type questions. Ecology, geography and literacy all in one afternoon!

For teachers out there who’d like to bring real research into the their primary or elementary school class, I think this project is ideally suited. For the younger ones, the classification interface is going to be tricky, but a computer hooked up to a projector or smartboard would allow the class to work together as a group identifying and counting the animals. I have extremely limited experience of working with this age group, so if any teachers out there have any idea’s how please share them below or upload them to ZooTeach.

Most middle and high school students should be able to participate on with very little input from teachers and I’d imagine that biology (and perhaps geography?) teachers won’t have any trouble finding curriculum links with this project. The original project (Serengeti Live) had a collection of quizzes which I’ve linked to on ZooTeach that would be useful for introducing Snapshot Serengeti.

Here at Zooniverse HQ we’re going to work on producing some lesson idea’s and resources to complement Snapshot Serengeti and in the not to distant future the project will have a map tool added. The map will allow you to see how many of each animal you have found at each camera trap, this will be a great additional resource, allowing students to take slightly deeper look at their own data set.

In the meantime, if anyone has any inspiring idea’s to help teachers and educators bring Snapshot Serengeti into the classroom so that kids everywhere can be ecologist for the day, please do share them!