Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Applying Geocaching Principles To Site-Based Citizen Science And Eliciting Reactions Via A Technology Probe, Matthew A. Dunlap, Anthony Tang, Saul Greenberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Site-based citizen science occurs when volunteers work with scientists to collect data at particular field locations. The benefit is greater data collection at lesser cost. Yet difficulties exist. We developed SCIENCECACHING, a prototype citizen science aid designed to mitigate four specific problems by applying aspects from another thriving location-based activity: geocaching as enabled by mobile devices. Specifically, to ease problems in data collection, SCIENCECACHING treats sites as geocaches: Volunteers find sites opportunistically via geocaching methods and use equipment and other materials pre-stored in cache containers. To ease problems in data validation, SCIENCECACHING flags outlier data as it is entered so …