I fundamentally disagree with the concept of creating a group of second class citizen scientists, allowed to play with the real people, but dismissed out of hand irrespective of merit. And besides as there is no automatic way to ensure schools or teachers use the proposed system it won’t have much effect.
I think we should go back a step and look at the problems that I think we want to solve with this:
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Minimise observations that have low value photos,
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Minimise low value identifications.
I’m not sure about how to minimise the low value photos, but maybe a new approach to the second would help that too:
Surely it is long past time we had a ‘competence’ based ID system where peoples IDs are not given full weight until they have demonstrated some ability in that area. Give higher and higher weighting depending upon people’s proven record, and perhaps the ability to create research grade observations with a single ID for ‘proven’ experts. This would also improve the value and reliability of ‘research grade’ observations.
I know this sort of thing has been mooted many times before, and I don’t know how much development has gone into this. But I think it much preferable to spend resources on something that would have a much wider effect, and would be self managing than creating a system that relies upon some external person (‘teacher’) to install their students in our play-pen.
[[ I was going to list many more details of this type of scheme, but remembered that it has all been discussed before, and it’s really a separate topic ]]
As for addressing low value observations, perhaps add a filter tick-box that filters out observations of newbies, or observations of unproven identifiers (implicit assumption that they’re newbies).
–Tony