Potential and pitfalls of citizen science with children: Reflections on Pollinators in the Playground project

Urban Farm DB summary

A reflection on a citizen science project in which five early-career and PhD female researchers guided school-age children across five schools to build artificial flowers, install them on school ovals, and record over repeated 10-minute observations how flower colour (yellow vs. blue) and configuration (isolated, clumped adjacent, clumped mixed-colour, clumped single-colour) affected the number and taxa of visiting insects. The project achieved a low-cost, engaging format and exposure to female STEM role models, but the authors report constraints including having to run it in a season made suboptimal by fixed school curricula, confounding of results caused by the children's own observations, and an inability to verify the collected data.