Daniel Edelson
FieldScope is a turnkey technology platform for networked field studies. As such, it provides simple tools that enable citizen science project organizers to configure a website and mobile app for their project participants to use to contribute geo-referenced data. This functionality makes FieldScope and other tools like it (e.g., citsci.org) valuable resources for the citizen science community because they enable project organizers whose resources are limited to set up and manage crowd-sourced data projects. FieldScope has demonstrated its value for this purpose, currently supporting nearly two dozen projects collectively logging more than 50,000 observations and measurements per year.
But FieldScope has a much more ambitious goal. Its long-term goal is to provide a platform that engages K-12 students and members of the general public in firsthand visualization and analysis of data. We see this as a way to provide inquiry-based learning experiences to students and an important step toward citizen science’s goal of empowering “ordinary citizens” to conduct science themselves. The development plan for FieldScope is to continue to expand its use as a tool for citizen science and then capitalize on the data in its libraries to provide opportunities for educators to engage their students in inquiry learning with authentic data.