The SciStarter 2.0 Research and Evaluation team will host a hands-on workshop on May 17, the first day of the Citizen Science Association conference. (Note: there’s still time to register for the conference and workshop!) When: Wednesday May 17, 2017 11:30am – 12:30pm Meeting Room 11
With an Advancing Informal STEM Learning (Pathways) grant from the National Science Foundation, SciStarter, Arizona State University and North Carolina State University (in collaboration with a dozen citizen science project owners and citizen scientists, a panel of advisors, and a team of evaluators) developed a suite of new, free project-agnostic tools and functionality to better support volunteers and project owners. This workshop will showcase to practitioners the opportunities presented by the SciStarter 2.0 tools to deepen volunteer engagement, learning and growth by addressing cross-project skew, evolving motivations, seasonal gaps, untapped synergies across projects via movements of volunteers, and other unanticipated factors that can be addressed with intentional planning in the SciStarter network but cannot be addressed via management within project silos. One goal of this workshop is to solicit input from project owners and evaluation/researchers to further improve the tools and prepare for the expansion of SciStarter 2.0 across hundreds of projects. The workshop will include a brief review of the new tools and functionality, hands-on demonstrations and test-drives of the tools, and discussions. We hope to empower project owners to consider how they can make the most of these free tools, leverage synergies with other projects, and demonstrate to evaluator/researchers how they can expand their repertoire of techniques beyond surveys to include embedded tracking of volunteer activity across projects and embedded assessments. Sign up for this free workshop when you register for the conference.
