Grab your pith helmet, camera and let’s go exploring with Project Noah.
Project Noah is a web and mobile (iOS and Android) platform that helps students become “citizen scientists” by encouraging exploration and shared documentation of wildlife and flora. Students can discover wildlife from around the world or simply examine the living world in their own backyard. Teachers can join existing missions or create missions to build a community of explorers, who contribute content to their students’ learning experiences.
On the surface, Project Noah is a collection of wildlife posts and photos. Photos resemble Instagram posts, but are much more information-rich. Pictures include wildlife identification (name and genus), the time and geo-location of the discovery and submission date. Posts provide a description of the animal and its habitat. Additional related spottings of the same wildlife are documented as well as nearby spottings of other plants, insects and animals to give students a richer contextual experience.
Missions
Teachers can create cataloging activities for their students, called missions. Missions are community-based activities and can be either local or global. Local missions allow students to explore the world around the school or local wildlife area. Global missions allow students to gather content from a world-wide network of contributors. In addition, Project Noah provides teaching resources and materials, including a “getting started with Project Noah” introduction, lesson plans and outlines to help you integrate missions into your curriculum.
Mobile
The power of Project Noah lies in its ability to harness a child’s natural curiosity and desire to share. To help students document wildlife and create out-of-the-classroom activities, Project Noah has created a mobile app (available for both iPhone and Android) that turns mobile devices into wildlife encyclopedia and scientific resource centres. The mobile app provides a field guide to help students identify and categorize wildlife, insects, water life and plants. Students can upload pictures and later edit their field entries. Geolocation helps pinpoint spottings and add information to each field entry.
Collaboration
Project Noah leverages crowd-sourced information for students to use and make their own contributions. Students can contribute to the knowledge base on the website by helping identify wildlife submissions or adding additional content to existing submissions. If students don’t know what type of wildlife they have catalogued, they can turn to Project Noah members for help in identifying spottings.
Patches
In addition, students can earn patches for joining and contributing to missions. Special achievement and specialist patches are available and are based on the type and consistent contributions to missions. What is the best part about the patches? They look like embroidered merit badges from scouting and add to the overall presentation of the vintage explorer-themed website and mobile apps.
Get your students excited about wildlife and take your classroom outside and mobile this summer with a little help from Project Noah.
Feature image courtesy of Flickr, Jenifer Corrêa.