SBIR Phase I: Engaging citizens in environmental research to impact science literacy and STEM careers while ensuring data integrity

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to engage citizen in environmental research activities, potentially increasing the selection of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers for youth. This project focuses on enhancing academic and industry partnerships around citizen science, improving science and environmental literacy, and increasing participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields of study. In addition to improving the nation’s scientific and technical workforce pipeline, the project seeks to employ a unique commercialization model for interactive educational media that allows for both authentic learning and widespread use by general audiences. This model mixes digital and in-person experiences, digital distribution methods, and mobile experience commercialization strategies that can serve as a model for other educational and commercial interactive media companies.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses two critical issues: engaging more youth in environmental science and engineering education and increasing local environmental data for scientists. The project team will research and develop optimal methods and tools for creating educational and interactive media with rapid scientific data collection capabilities. For youth and educators, the project seeks to engage users in national standards-aligned scientific learning activities. The project will create hyperlocal networks that collect data and make results directly available to local communities so that they can actively track pressing environmental concerns such as migrations and changes in populations of species. The technical goals of the project include creating new processes for connecting local, crowdsourced user input to citizen science data repositories in a way that automates the categorization and validation of that data. The resulting project will actively engage youth in real scientific research and improve data collection for federal and university environmental science programs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.