An Educator’s Guide To Our Group Engagement Tools

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. 

Tracking Individual and Collective Impact

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. 

Personal Stats

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. 

Group Stats

Groups in Zooniverse can view their collective impact, set shared goals, and celebrate milestones. These tools empower educators to engage students in new ways.

Step 1: Create Your Group

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. 

Step 2: Invite Participants to Join Your Group

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. 

Step 3: View/Share Your Group Stats

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. 

Celebrating Milestones

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.

Example: STEM Club at a Public Library

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.

Other Use Cases

• Friendly competition among class periods
• Extra credit opportunities for your students
• Extension activity after a museum field trip experience
• Summer camp group tracking independent research time

Share your Stories of Impact with Us

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! 

Get in Touch

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!