For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-10-lunar
There’s a full moon tonight, so that means it’s time for a report from the Lunar Society of the River Houses.
The Lunar Society is one of our big and wonderful long-term plans to encourage homeschoolers to participate in real online research projects and to share their results with other homeschool families.
Here’s an outline of the idea, along with a list of some of the great projects that homeschool students (and their parents) can join and contribute to, from history to geography to physics to natural history to mathematics to meteorology to literature to galactic exploration:
Browse through that project list and find one or two that would be a good fit for your family and a good match for your interests. Before you know it, your students will be learning a host of valuable skills and your little home academy will be well on its way to becoming an international research powerhouse. π¬ π π₯ π¦ π βοΈ β π π² π
Over time, it’s my hope that these monthly reports about the Lunar Society will evolve into something like a forum where homeschoolers participating in online research can share their accomplishments.
As a simple example, here’s my own personal report for the past lunar month on the two types of projects I participate in: eBird monitoring of bird populations, and distributed computing research using the Berkeley open infrastructure application. You and your students can participate right now in these projects, and in many others too.
On the eBird website (eBird.org), sponsored by Cornell University, I’ve been tracking the birds in a small riverside park near me (eBird hotspot L6926932) and have so far contributed a total of 616 checklists (daily observation reports) for this locality β it’s a site that had never been documented before. When all the checklists are combined and charted automatically by eBird you can really get a sense of the seasonal distribution and migration patterns for the year β take a look:
And here’s a sample checklist so you can see what they look like:
You can start keeping a similar eBird list for a location near you β your backyard, or a local park or other natural area. (Helping to track a public park or eBird “hotspot” will let you generate more useful results.) You can even add photos and sound recordings to your reports if you wish. Just pay a visit to the eBird website (ebird.org) and start exploring.
Distributed computing projects use idle time on your computer to perform scientific calculations on various kinds of complex data. The most popular distributed computing projects run on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform (BOINC), and I contribute computer time (whenever my laptop is plugged in) to three of these: (1)Β the SETI@Home project, sponsored by the University of California, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (really!); (2)Β the Einstein@Home project, which studies neutron stars; and (3)Β the MilkyWay@Home project, which studies the history and structure of our galaxy.
I’ve created River Houses team pages for each of these projects (Einstein@Home team, MilkyWay@Home team, SETI@Home team). Once your computer is signed up to participate you can join one of these teams and also print “certificates of computation” that show how much data you’ve individually processed and how much your team has processed β they’re just the thing for your homeschool bulletin board. (And while they are running, both Einstein@Home and SETI@Home have cool screensavers that show you in real time what your computer is analyzing.) π‘
[For embedded images click to attached blog post]
And here’s another level of skill development for your high-school (or even advanced middle-school) students: once you’ve processed a few weeks or months of data, you can start graphing your contributions. Using Google Sheets, I’ve set up a simple chart of River Houses team results, and this is what it looks like:
[For embedded images click to attached blog post]
That’s just a simple graphing exercise β nothing particularly profound. It’s something that can be refined, developed, and expanded in the future. (And your students can develop their own individual charts as well.)
The Internet provides exceptional opportunities for homeschool students to participate in real research projects in many different scientific and scholarly fields, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. The examples above are just a few that happen to interest me β pay a visit to our Lunar Society page to read about many more projects in a great variety of areas that you and your family can join.
What scholarly and scientific discoveries have you made in your homeschool this month? π
β‘β The friends who made the future: You can learn more about the original Lunar Society of Birmingham in “The Lunar Men,” a fine short video from History West Midlands. π
β‘β Featured this month at Zooniverse: Looking for a good place to get started? Zooniverse.org is one of the biggest clearinghouses for citizen science projects, and each month on their front page they specially feature one of their many research projects you can join. This month’s featured project is the Galaxy Zoo Clump Scout β help find regions of space where stars are being born! (Yes, that’s something you and your students can really work on from your home computer.) If you’re looking for a project to get yourself started, this might be a good choice. π
β‘β Calling all photographers: If you’ve got a budding photographer in your homeschool, one group project you can participate in is the Wikimedia Commons Photo Challenge. A different theme is chosen each month; just sign up and follow the instructions to submit your own entries. Once you’re a registered participant you can also vote for each month’s winners. πΈ
β‘β Books in the running brooks: If you decide to participate in eBird, our recommended homeschool reference library (riverhouses.org/books) includes an excellent bird guide that would serve your family well. And for any astronomical projects you may join, our recommended backyard night-sky guide and world atlas (which has an astronomical section) will help you orient yourself to the objects you are studying in the starry vault above. π¦ π
β‘β Whether they work together or apart: This is one of our regular Lunar Society Bulletins about the many cooperative research projects we recommend to homeschool students. Add your name to our free weekly mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) and get more great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year. π
If you have high-school homeschoolers with a real interest in NASA and space exploration, here’s a great academic project they can contribute to at the National Archives.
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