How simple citizen science lets your students discover a species no one has named yet
After the final bell last April, I was erasing the 7th grade science whiteboard for the next day when Mia and Javi banged on the classroom door, both clutching a chipped mason jar half-full of murky brown pond water. Crumbled granola bar bits stuck to Javi’s hoodie, and Mia’s rain boot had a hole in the sole from tromping through the muddy edge of the golf course pond three blocks from school. They wouldn’t leave until I looked through their microscope.
I leaned in and adjusted the focus. There it was: long, thin strands twisted tight into irregular little knots, nothing like the smooth, round spirogyra we’d studied for our protist unit. I flipped through our tattered classroom field guide, pulled up three public algal databases, and still couldn’t match it. Neither could the other two science teachers I dragged over to take a look. That’s when I remembered the free summer workshop I’d attended, the one with terrible coffee and no required follow-up, about community science projects that accept student-collected algal samples for university research.
Mia and Javi spent the next afternoon after class following the step-by-step guide posted for free on the project’s website. They took five clear photos with our classroom’s cheap digital camera attachment, scraped a tiny sample of the growth into a sterile vial, and slipped it into the pre-paid envelope the project sent us when we signed up. We dropped it in the school mailbox on the way out, and I didn’t think much of it for a few weeks. I’d seen dozens of these student projects go nowhere, and I didn’t want to get their hopes up.
Three weeks later, the lead researcher emailed back. The genetic sequence didn’t match any named species logged in the global GenBank database. For now, it’s a mystery alga waiting for a formal description—and a name.
I’ve had a lot of parents and fellow teachers ask me lately why I waste class time on open-ended projects like this instead of sticking to the scripted curriculum that prepares kids for our state’s standardized tests. I get the pressure. Everyone’s stressed about test scores, about checking boxes for college, about making sure kids don’t fall behind. But what most people don’t see is how this kind of work shifts how kids see themselves as learners, long before any test score matters.
Mia used to turn in less than half her homework, and she’d tell anyone who asked that science was just “memorizing boring facts old guys figured out a hundred years ago.” Now she stays after school every Wednesday to help new 6th graders collect pond samples and learn to use the microscopes. Javi used to refuse to write anything longer than a paragraph, but he’s been working on a 10-page report about water quality at the golf course pond for the county fair, no extra credit required, no one making him do it.
You don’t need a fancy lab, a big budget, or a background in biology to do this kind of work with your kids or students. I’ve been doing this for eight years, and I still can’t tell most common algae apart without a field guide. The work doesn’t have to take over your schedule, either. For classroom teachers, block just 45 minutes once a month for unstructured “mystery organism” time, no grades, no required outcome. Sign up for the Algal Diversity Community Project newsletter—they send out free pre-paid sample collection kits twice a year to K-12 classrooms, no strings attached. If you’re a parent looking for a low-lift weekend activity, pick up a $25 clip-on digital microscope for your phone, scoop a jar of water from the nearest park pond, and post any weird, unrecognizable finds to the “Unknown Algae” project on iNaturalist. The volunteer experts on the site will weigh in within a few days, most of the time.
Most of the time, you’ll find something that’s already been named. That’s fine. The point isn’t to get a species named after your kid. It’s to dismantle the idea that all the important discoveries have already been made, that learning is just memorizing what other people already know. Too many kids grow up thinking science (or any kind of learning, really) is something that happens to other people, in fancy labs far away, not something they can do in their own neighborhood after school.
We still don’t have final confirmation that our mystery alga is a completely new species. The research team is sequencing the full genome now, and that could take another year or two. Mia still wants to name it Gonium pretzela after the twisted shape and her rescue beagle, Pretzel. Javi wants to call it Sphaerocystis goldefinii after the golf course where we found it. Either way, it doesn’t matter that much.
Last month, three new groups of my students started collecting samples from other local waterways, all convinced they’re going to find their own mystery organism. One of them brought in a jar of green slime scraped from the side of the school’s water fountain yesterday. We put it under the scope this morning, and none of us have any clue what it is. We’re sending our photos off to the project next week.
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