What Happens When Your Students Get To Look For Unnamed Algae: A Teacher’s Perspective
Last October, I was leaning over a lab bench in my 10th grade biology class, squinting through a microscope, while three girls hovered behind me breathing down my neck. The heat had kicked on that morning and was cranked too high, so the air smelled like old floor wax and the half-eaten cheese stick one of them left in the trash. They’d collected a sample of pond water from the little unmaintained pond behind the soccer field, the one we usually skip because it’s full of goose poop. But they’d begged to go anyway, because Lila, the one with chipped cobalt nail polish and a habit of doodling diatoms in the margins of her notebook, said she saw something green and fuzzy growing on a fallen log there the week before.
When I looked through the lens, I saw what they were excited about. Strung across the slide were clusters of tiny, heart-shaped algal cells linked together in long, wispy filaments. It didn’t match any of the common green algae we’d ID’d all semester, and when we cross-checked it against the regional biodiversity database we use for our citizen science project, nothing lined up. “Is it new?” Mia, the group’s note-taker, asked, leaning in so her ponytail almost brushed the lens. I told her I didn’t know for sure, but I’d send the photos and preserved sample to the lead researcher we work with at the state university to check.
I started doing this project two years ago, after I got sick of grading the same cookie-cutter lab report where every kid identifies Spirogyra and calls it a day. Kids would leave my class thinking science was just memorizing names other people already came up with, not something you get to do. I saw a call for participants from the university’s freshwater biodiversity project, launched after widespread flooding three years ago rearranged nearly every small pond and wetland in our region. They sent free glass slides and covered the cost of a digital microscope adapter for my classroom, all I had to do was let kids collect samples once a unit and submit their finds.
Most groups find nothing unexpected. Last year, one group turned up an invasive algae species that hadn’t been recorded in our county before, which was exciting for local ecologists, but it had already been named and studied by other scientists. This is the first time we’ve had a sample that might be completely new to science.
Two weeks after that first look, Lila’s mom emailed me. She said Lila was staying up an extra hour every night sorting through algae photos online, skipping her after-school math study session to come in and re-examine the sample, and talking about nothing else at dinner. She wanted to know if this was “a good use of her time” when midterms were coming up. I wrote back and told her that Lila had already mastered every learning objective for our classification unit that semester: she can explain the difference between green algae and cyanobacteria, sort samples by physical traits, and cross-reference regional databases to narrow down matches. Most kids just memorize those facts for the test and forget them a week later. Lila was living them.
A lot of parents and even other teachers ask me why I bother with this kind of open-ended project when standardized test scores matter so much for school funding and college admissions. The simple answer is that it doesn’t take that much time away from required content, and the lessons kids learn stick better than any worksheet. You don’t need a big budget or fancy training to pull it off, either. If you’re a teacher who wants to try something similar, start by checking the biology department page of your local university. Most have ongoing citizen science projects that are desperate for amateur collectors, and many will send free supplies or even come talk to your class if you ask. If you’re a parent, you can do this at home for next to nothing: a working pocket microscope costs $15 on Amazon, the iNaturalist app is free, and there are dozens of global biodiversity projects that accept submissions from amateur naturalists. If your kid brings home a jar of muddy pond water or a weird piece of bark covered in fuzz, don’t make them throw it out immediately. Spend 10 minutes looking at it with them, snap a photo, and upload it. That’s all it takes.
The thing most people don’t know is that millions of species on Earth still haven’t been named by scientists. Most of the big, flashy animals are done, but small, overlooked organisms—algae, fungi, tiny insects, lichen—are still largely unstudied. Professional scientists don’t have time to survey every little neighborhood pond or empty lot, so they rely on ordinary people looking closer at the places no one else bothers to check. Your student, your kid, could stumble on something no one has ever formally documented.
Right now, our preserved sample is sitting in a university lab cooler, waiting for DNA sequencing this spring. If it turns out to be a new species, the research team told Lila and her group they can suggest the official species name. They’re leaning toward honoring the soccer field where it was found, but Lila wants to add a subtle nod to the goose poop that made everyone write the pond off as gross anyway.
Even if it turns out to just be a weird, mutated variant of a known species, it doesn’t really change much. Lila still stops by my room after school most weeks to talk about other local ponds she wants to sample, and she told me last month she’s now planning to apply to college for environmental science, something she never mentioned before this project. I still have the photo of our algae saved on my classroom desktop. I don’t know what will come of it, but it’s a good reminder that the most interesting learning usually happens when we let kids check the places everyone else skips. Some days, they find things no one has ever seen before.
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