What are the first three activities that you would do with each of the Public Lab Tools?

Popular activities:

Flying Balloons/Kites with Cameras:

• over beaches to track pollution at the shoreline

• over wetlands to track loss or restoration over time

• over urban waterways to track sewage in the water and discover what vegetation thrives on the edge.

• over contested urban areas to map local inhabitants narratives and perception of space.

Reading Rainbows AKA Spectroscopy

• Taking a spectrum of the sky above your house, to see water vapor, O3, etc.

• Identifying crude oil by causing it to fluoresce into the visible spectrum with a blue laser. See Jeff's research note

• Measuring contaminants from gas flares with a spectrometer backpack on your smartphone (read a draft activity guide on this here)

Scaling popular activities

If lots of folks are doing these activities, it would create large datasets that could be very interesting. For instance, if a first task for spectrometry is checking whether detergents have brighteners, with many groups trying this to learn spectrometry, Public Lab can collaboratively generate an archive of detergents with and without brighteners, that can be confirmed by multiple times. This would enable students to learn not only learn the method but also the value of repetition in science to confirm results.

A small example of this is: Joshmc work: https://spectralworkbench.org/sets/show/15

Which has been repeated by: warren: https://spectralworkbench.org/sets/show/24 ykohdlu repetition of it: https://spectralworkbench.org/profile/ykohdlu

Related

See also the idea of organizing activity guides according to environmental issues, e.g., "The Oil Spill Toolkit": http://publiclab.org/wiki/oil-response-toolkit-planning