We are big fans of citizen science! Of course, science is always cool, and STEM/STEAM projects are an increasing part of everyone’s work and school experiences. So understanding how science works is not just fun, but a good way to understand what is going on in the world around us all.
So we are sharing some neat science you can do, contributing toward large projects, and learning new things. Maybe you can use this today; maybe you will save it for later. As long as you enjoy some exploration and learning new things – citizen science is for you! And it is definitely something you can use to bring some good programming to your library.
Check out this project from SciStarter:
| Presented By | Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich |
|---|---|
| Goal | ARTigo builds an artwork search engine |
| Task | While playing games, player are tagging artworks |
| Where | View map… |
| Description | Art history studies mainly original artworks, but often their reproductions, too. Today, these reproductions exist in substantial electronic repositories sometimes amounting to several million items. What can we do to retrieve these reproductions preferably on the basis of various criteria? As the possibilities of a computerized search of these reproductions are still very limited we allocate keywords, known as metadata. This is a most time-consuming operation and one would need a great number of staff members to do this job. We would appreciate your contribution to this game. However, we don’t only want something from you but we offer you as well entertainment and at the same time training as you get to know quite a lot about the paintings shown here. In addition to that, you will be able to work with the descriptions you gave us. |
| How to get started | Visit http://www.artigo.org/about.html and enjoy the ARTigo-games in your web browser. |
| Social Media | Follow ARTigo on Twitter |
| How-To Video | Check out the how-to video |
| Total expense | 0.00 |
| Ideal Age Group | High school (14 – 17 years), Middle school (11 – 13 years), Elementary school (6 – 10 years), Seniors, Families, Adults, Graduate students, College, |
| Spend the time | Indoors |
| Ideal Frequency | Just once |
| Average Time | One minute |
| Topics | Computers & Technology, Education, |
| Media Mentions & Publications | Karido: A GWAP for Telling Artworks Apart.Squaring and Scripting the ESP Game: Trimming a GWAP to Deep SemanticsARTigo: Building an Artwork Search Engine With Games and Higher-Order Latent Semantic Analysis |
| Tags | arts, artwork, artworks, combino, education, game, games, humanities, karido, search, taboo, tagging, |
| Sustainable Development Goals | Relevant Sustainable Development Goals, identified by  ?: Sustainable Cities and Communities |
| Website | ARTigo |
And if you want to bring in a few of these ideas to your library, it is useful to have a variety of different program strategies to help share this project. We have a few suggestions to help you get started:
- Look at at least five different types of art
- Draw a picture, in the style of another art work
- Write an essay about an artist
- Pull up images of the same item or place created by different artists and compare the differences
- What kinds of tags do you use? Make a lists of tags you could use for school, for work, or in your every day life