From Ideas to Action: The Best Citizen Science Projects from the Oliphant Science Awards

Citizen science involves public participation and collaboration in scientific research with the aim to increase and translate scientific knowledge. It’s a great way to harness community skills and passion to fuel our ability to understand how the world works and how to protect it.

The Citizen Science category in the Oliphant Science Awards is designed to involve whole classes or school groups in meaningful citizen science projects. Take a look at the Primary and Secondary winning projects from this year!

Heathfield Primary School

Project: Biophilic Design

Heathfield Primary School specialises in Science and the Adelaide Hills location of the school provides a unique opportunity to research, explore and discover within that ecosystem. Over the years students have worked with Landcare organisations with a focus on bushland management so when the opportunity arose to use their scientific skills to connect nature with learning, the students were eager to engage.

The students were partnered with Biophilic architect and university lecturer, Dr Shokry Abdelaal for a citizen science project to investigate the impact of biophilic design on learning and wellbeing.

The benefits of biophillic design have been extensively researched. Future Proofing Schools; Phase 1 Research Compilation is an Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by the University of Melbourne. It provides precise data on the positive impacts of natural ventilation, natural lighting, good acoustics and indoor air quality on both the staff and children. Providing spaces that are open and connected to the outdoors increases mental stimuli, energy and physical comfort levels and this, in turn, increases cognitive ability, attention and memory levels (O'Brien & Murray, 2007).

With a focus on Science as a human endeavour, particularly the use and influence of science students consider how people use scientific explanations to meet a need or solve a problem. Recent data has shown an increase in issues due to mental health and wellbeing impacting a student’s ability to learn. Through a student lead science inquiry students contribute to the development of a solution. Whilst students will engage in learning about living things and their needs as well as properties of materials they will have an opportunity to apply this understanding to address an authentic issue. Whilst this report focusses on the science behind the project it is to be noted that these students also explored resilience, mental health and wellbeing as part of their learning in Health.

Our big question: How can we redesign the middle years learning spaces with biophilic elements to improve our wellbeing and ability to learn which is affordable and safe for students and teachers?

Read the full report here.

The Singh Brothers

Glenunga International High School

Project: Changes in Air Quality Across the Adelaide CBD

Finding Curiosity and Preliminary Planning for the Investigation

As environmental enthusiasts, we chose to study changes in air quality across the Adelaide Central Business District (CBD) due to its significant impact on public health and environmental sustainability (Environment Protection Authority South Australia, 2019) …

To answer our questions, we decided that it is best to conduct a study on this topic. Although cities like New Delhi in India would allow us to obtain greater values and hence widely accepted results, we thought that we could organise a similar study within Adelaide. By organising such a citizen science investigation, we believed that we could recognise locations within the CBD with inferior air quality levels and places with strong air quality levels (National Weather Service, n.d.). We would then analyse the characteristics of areas with high levels of air quality and then suggest those characteristics to be applied to low air quality scoring sites. The findings or principles of such characteristics could serve as the basis for helping to reduce the terrible air quality in locations such as New Delhi (United Nations Environment Programme).

For this research, we brainstormed the following questions:

1. Where in the CBD is air quality good, and where is it bad?
2. What are the reasons for the air quality in certain areas to be good or bad?
3. Does air quality relate to the amount of green spaces or traffic levels?
4. What effects can air quality have on human behaviour?
5. Have any Adelaide CBD citizens experienced such struggles with air quality which has caused changes in behaviour?
6. Is the Adelaide CBD air quality fairly good due to commuter choices? Do people make purposeful decisions to do good for the environment?

Ultimately, after careful analysis of the questions mentioned above, we decided that we could condense those into three main aims for the investigation:

1. Identifying spatial changes in air quality.
2. Analysing the reasons behind changes in air quality, and where it is considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
3. To discover commuter characteristics, demographics, behaviour, and perceptions.

Read the full report here.