Tension is mounting. The weather has been against our family vacation for the first couple of days, and I can see from the way my kids are circling the hotel room that summer boredom is fast approaching. We were out and about until it really started coming down. Since then, they’ve played cards. They’ve watched the rain pouring on the open water from the balcony. I even managed to get them to come back to the window to watch a boat picking up crab traps. Screen time is being saved for later, and we’ve been through pounds of books. In a last-ditch effort to preempt the needling and recreational outrage that is virtually inevitable among unoccupied siblings, I grab a little chemistry set and announce that we’re going to get it ready for testing some water samples tomorrow. We dump the vials, tablets, thermometer, and little bullseye sticker onto the coffee table in the sitting room and get to work.

Beyond merely preventing summer boredom, encouraging our kids’ interest science is as basic to their upbringing as teaching them to read, making sure that they get enough sleep, and supporting them in building friendships. In doing so, we’re helping them to be inquisitive and cultivating skills they can use to teach themselves. Learning about science prepares them for a world that increasingly rewards technical knowledge and skills. We’re also raising good citizens. Our children need to understand the process of science, how to ask critical questions about it, and how to effectively turn it into action.

Among the most important things parents can do to help their children learn, is to engage kids’ natural curiosity and reinforce that science is relevant. Kids (and adults for that matter) are more likely to learn, ask questions, and return to a subject if it grabs their attention and if they understand that it has a purpose.

Citizen science can do exactly this.

Created by universities, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and others, citizen science programs offer parents and kids opportunities to learn about a wide range of sciences hands-on, often at home or otherwise in local communities. Many programs get kids outside or encourage them to observe things going on outdoors. These are some favorites, but there are a lot more options, and new ones spring up all the time:

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Mping

Mark Twain is famously quoted (or arguably, misquoted) as having observed, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The National Severe Storms Laboratory’s mPING program offers everyone an opportunity to do something, if not about the weather, then at least about the accuracy of forecasts. Anyone with a smart phone can provide simple observations to help professional meteorologists fine-tune correlations between instrument observations, models, and your local conditions.

Participating is as easy as downloading the free mPING app (Android or iPhone) and running it to submit your observations. The advantage to this is simplicity. If you start downloading now, you could be participating by the time you finish reading this article. Once it’s on your phone, submitting data only takes a moment. It’s also a quick way to redirect kids, provided that you’re outside or at least near a window. “Rather than shrieking at your brother, would you like to do a weather observation with Dad?”

EarthEcho Water Challenge

The EarthEcho Water Challenge is a global project to help kids understand healthy water by testing their local lakes, streams, rivers, or even oceans and bays. With the help of adults, kids collect small water samples and test the temperature, acidity, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity. EarthEcho collects the data through a website, which shows all of the data from around the world on a map.

There’s a cost associated with this program. A single test kit with supplies for up to 50 water tests costs about $25, including shipping.

Hour of Code

The inclusion of programming among the likes of ecology and meteorology is bound to raise some hackles as to whether programming constitutes a science, or at least spark some philosophizing about the difference between science and technology. We’re going to take a collective deep breath, suppress our inner Sheldon Cooper, and proceed.

The Hour of Code is an effort to get kids started learning programming. Through the Code.org website (and lots of partner sites), the Hour of Code offers online tutorials to teach basics of code and algorithm design to kids as young as four. The project does get a little commercial, and perhaps more appealing to older kids, with the inclusion of characters from Star Wars, Frozen, Minecraft, and Plants vs. Zombies.

Galaxy Zoo

I remember Comet Shumaker-Levy 9’s machine-gun impact with Jupiter like it was yesterday. More recently, NASA’s New Horizons probe provided the first detailed images of Pluto, and is racing toward comets in the remote Kuiper Belt. There’s an underground lake on Mars. Astronomy is a science of outlandish extremes that can capture kids’ imaginations. Objects in space can be enormous, fast moving, and hot or cold almost beyond description.

Galaxy Zoo enables laypeople- even kids- to help professional astronomers make sense of deep space images of galaxies. Members of the public participate by comparing pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to simple diagrams of galaxies. Classifying the images helps astronomers to study how these gargantuan masses of stars and planets affect one another.

Backyard Habitats

If you’re ready to get creative and hands-on, the National Wildlife Federation offers a program to help restore habitat at your own home. NWF’s program offers a simple, flexible set of guidelines for providing food, water, shelter, and other wildlife needs, while reducing negative environmental impacts. It can also enable you help professional scientists through Cornell’s Project Feederwatch over the winter.

If the word ‘wildlife’ unsettles you, fear not. You can create habitat for anything from butterflies to birds, depending on what lives in your area, and what you’re comfortable with. And, despite the name ‘Backyard Habitats,’ having a backyard is by no means a requirement for participation. There are ample stories and blog posts about people getting inventive and fitting the required elements onto a small apartment balcony.

Invest in a good all-in-one field guide, like National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Mid-Atlantic States, to help learn about the wildlife you’re attracting.

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Next day, the water test makes for a good way to end a long day at the beach and get the kids mobilized to start packing up. They excitedly declare the temperature reading, and scrutinize the pH test, until everyone is comfortable with the verdict. We have averted, or at least postponed, catastrophe yet again.

Each of them gets to make some choices about collecting the water samples, and everyone gets to use at least a couple of pieces of equipment, most importantly the pH and dissolved oxygen tablets that change the color of the water. We talk about what the readings mean, and enjoy the walk back from the shore on a hot day.

Photo credit: Pixabay