Tag: citizen science
-
Wild Cricket Tales
We have a brand new citizen science project starting with the wild crickets research group at Exeter University! These researchers are examining how evolution works with insects in their natural environment, rather than in lab conditions. In order to do this they have hundreds of CCTV cameras set up recording the burrows of field crickets,…
-
A talk on citizen science games and teaching programming
From earlier in the year at Thinking Digital 2014 in Gateshead.
-
News from egglab
9,000 players, 20,000 games played and 400,000 tested egg patterns later we have over 30 generations complete on most of our artificial egg populations. The overall average egg difficulty has risen from about 0.4 seconds at the start to 2.5 seconds. Thank you to everyone who contributed their time to playing the game! We spawned…
-
Egglab – meet Ms Easter Robot Nightjar and her genetically programmed eggs!
We’ve released our latest citizen science camouflage game Egglab! I’ve been reporting on this for a while here so it’s great to have it released in time for Easter – we’ve had coverage in the Economist, which is helping us recruit egg hunters and 165,000 eggs have been tested so far over the last 3…
-
Egglab – pattern generation obsession
I’m putting the final pieces together for the release of the all new Project Nightjar game (due in the run up to Easter, of course!) and the automatic pattern generation has been a focus right up to this stage. The challenge I like most about citizen science is that along with all the ‘normal’ game…
-
Project Nightjar: Camouflage data visualisation and possible internet robot predators
We’ve had tens of thousands of people spotting nightjars and donating a bit of their time to sensory ecology research. The results of this (of course it’s still on-going, along with the new nest spotting game) is a 20Mb database with hundreds of thousands of clicks recorded. One of the things we were interested in…
-
Project Nightjar: Where is that nest?
We’ve released a new game for Project Nightjar called Where is that nest? This is an adaptation of Where is that nightjar?, but the variety of species of birds is greater, some of the nests are much harder to find than the birds were so we added two levels – and a hall of fame…
-
Where is that nightjar?
The first Project Nightjar game is online! It’s a perception test to see how good you are at spotting the camouflaged birds – a great use of the photos the researchers are collecting in the field, and we can also use the data as an experiment by comparing our timing when searching for birds with…
-
New project with the Sensory Ecology and Evolution group at Exeter University
Time to announce a new a new project with the Sensory Ecology and Evolution group at Exeter University. We’re going to be working on games and experimental online work to bring their research into the evolution of camouflage and animal perception to new audiences, particularly focused on these stealthy characters, the Fiery-necked Nightjar: The group’s…