Long term student engagement with iNaturalist (what students do after the class is over)

[anneclewis]

@mail540

Of the 28 of us only three others besides myself are still regularly posting.

That’s slightly better than a 10% activation to active user which isn’t too shabby. When you figure in that a certain number more have a “brand awareness” the impact of that one class is pretty significant.

[JaneBP]

I’m geocacher, too! I always think that geocaching could be used for much more, like local science. Some people do use it for more by hiding their caches in their little free libraries.

[JaneBP]

I just went to a geocaching event where a woman who makes mystery caches showed me a whole series of them on women in STEM! I think that would be using it for “something more” as I said above!

[teellbee]

Yes, exactly! I used to work for a kids’ natural science organization.

I created a geocaching activity that could cover so many different aspects of science (triangulation, planetary science, radio waves, satellites, even more).

Then we went outdoors into the woods with donated gps units and hunted! It was really fun . We did this in after school science and summer camps.

Wow, I have not geocached in years, but I remember some extremely creative people making caches the drew people outdoors. Such as, those folks who would not likely have experienced outdoors otherwise.

[Kimbrown]

How did you follow your students’ after they left your class? Did you have to search each student individually or were they in some type of group or project?

[sjurdur]

I really appreciate this post and I hope you publish these positive results! I have a (maybe dumb) question, but what age group do are your students? and would you think there is a lower or higher limit to what ages you can encourage students to try out inaturalist?

[cthawley]

I don’t think that there’s any “higher” limit!

For a lower limit, 13 is a good one in some ways, because individuals under age 13 are not allowed to open their own iNat accounts (see https://www.inaturalist.org/user_parents/new). It is possible to have younger individuals use Seek or something like a whole class account administered by a teacher, but that can be a little tricky and wouldn’t allow tracking long term engagement easily.