BashTheBugPhilip W Fowler is a computational biophysicist studying antimicrobial resistance working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
We gave a talk, “Setting up an online citizen science project on the Zooniverse is easy: the BashTheBug experience” to other researchers at the University of Oxford as part of this week-long online public engagement with research conference. In it, we talk our experiences with BashTheBug and setup live a demo project “Chihuahua or Muffin?”. Although aimed at other researchers, feel free to have a look! You can find the video of our talk here.
In response to the COVID pandemic, UN Environment (UNEP), TED Education, and many other partners and contributors around the world launched Earth School, which aims to give kids, parents, and teachers 30 days of daily “quests,” or curated learning experiences that highlight how we are connected to nature from home. Quests began on Earth Day, April 22nd, and will continue to be released until World Environment Day, on June 5th.
The Citizen Science Quest of Earth School launched on Wednesday 27 May 2020 and BashTheBug was chosen by SciStarter as one of the Citizen Science projects.
As part of the Talking Science series, Philip Fowler gave an evening talk via Zoom on Fri 15 May 2020.
The recording can be watched via this link using the password 8r.%m4=4
Ariel Zych and Diana Montano team from Science Friday hosted a discussion with Philip Fowler (BashTheBug lead), Carla Wright (BashTheBug coordinator) and Helen Spiers (Zooniverse liaison) yesterday on Facebook.
You can watch a recording of the livestream here.
This was a first time the BashTheBug has ever done anything like this, so let us know if you’d like more, or equally if you’d like something different.
Last Friday 24 April 2020, Laura Trouille, who is Co-Principal Investigator for the Zooniverse and Vice President of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium, was interviewed on the popular North American radio show, ScienceFriday.
Laura talked about four Zooniverse projects, and BashTheBug was one of them!
You can listen to her interview by following this link to the Science Friday website, or the episode is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Podcasts.
You may have received this email from the Zooniverse Team and already taken part; if so, thank you. If not, please consider participating as the more volunteers take part, the better.
You reached three million classifications on Sun 19 April 2020.
That means it took you only 38 days to add a million classifications, which is astonishing. That averages out as one every 3 seconds. The previous million took nearly a year-and-a-half!
Since we asked you all to send in your words and images last month to celebrate reaching two million, we decided to recognise reaching three million classifications by overlaying onto the BashTheBug logo all the usernames of everyone who has participated, even if you’ve just done a single classification. That is 19,639 usernames, however, so the writing is really, really tiny — you’ll need to download the high resolution image and then zoom in!
If you didn’t login to the Zooniverse, you won’t find yourself on the logo I’m afraid, and also if you deleted your account it will also be missing.
Like many of you, the researchers behind BashTheBug have been at home for a while now due to restrictions put in place to slow the progress of this COVID-19 epidemic.
You reached two million classifications on Thu 12 March 2020.
On Friday 13 March I visited The Batt School in Witney, Oxfordshire as part of their activities for STEM week. This is a primary school (5-11 year olds) and has 2 classes of 30 per year group. I introduced around 60 Year 6 students to the idea of citizen science on the Zooniverse, focussing on BashTheBug. Both classes were very keen to do classifications on the big screen and I had some excellent questions, not all of them “on topic”!