Science Hunters is an outreach project which employs the computer game Minecraft to engage children with scientific learning and research through school visits, events, and extracurricular clubs. We principally target children who may experience barriers to accessing Higher Education, including low socioeconomic status,...
Meaningful science engagement beyond one-way outreach is needed to encourage science-based decision making. This pilot study aimed to instigate dialogue and deliberation concerning climate change and public health. Feedback from science café participants was used to design a panel-based museum exhibit that asked visitors to...
Over the past decade, science festival expos have emerged as popular opportunities for practicing scientists to engage in education outreach with public audiences. In this paper, a partial proportional odds model was used to analyze 5,498 surveys collected from attendees at 14 science expos around the United States....
Young people's decisions to study post-compulsory science are strongly influenced by the attitude of their parents, but many families, especially those from deprived backgrounds, see science as ‘narrow’ and ‘not for us’. We asked whether family attendance at a science festival — a growing but under-studied activity — could...
Seven papers focusing on "design standards", "design methods" and "user experience in the physical and digital world" explore how citizen science volunteers interact with digital tools, what they expect from them, and why these technologies succeed or fail.
Focusing on a recent standard (BS ISO 27500:2016 “The human-centred organisation”) which encourages the adoption of a sociotechnical systems perspective across a wide range of businesses, organizations and ventures, authors discuss its potential application to virtual citizen science.
Although hundreds of citizen science applications exist, there is lack of detailed analysis of volunteers' needs and requirements, usability mistakes and user experiences. Authors perform a literature review to identify articles which discuss user issues and develop a set of design guidelines.
“In citizen science, user-centred development is often emphasised for its potential to involve participants in the development of technology. We describe the development process of the mobile app ‘Naturblick’ as an example of a user-centred design in citizen science.”
The analysis of volunteer interaction with 63 projects demonstrates how project design changes can influence who and how participates. Findings highlight the tension between designing for social good and broad community engagement, versus optimizing for scientific and analytical efficiency
An analysis of the multi-touch interface for the citizen science video game Foldit, comparing multi-touch and mouse interfaces in a 41-subject user study, indicates that for tasks involving guided movement, subjects using the multi-touch interface completed tasks more accurately.
