Frontiers for Young Minds is excited to announce its new partnership with The GLOBE Program!

GLOBE (The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) is a K-12 citizen science program that has reached more than 10 million students in the last 20 years. Classrooms that participate in GLOBE campaigns join an international community of students studying their local environments and creating massive data sets available to the scientific community. By learning about their environments locally, students can start to understand how local pieces fit together to create a global system. Students in different parts of the world look at the same problem – such as surface temperature or soil moisture – and compare their findings with those from a different country or continent.

But to make that possible, all of the data need to be compatible. That is why the GLOBE Program has passionate members from throughout the scientific community proposing campaigns, creating training materials and tools for students to take part, guiding students in collecting data, and providing feedback to students about the impact of their efforts.

GLOBE encourages scientists to get involved with outreach, providing information about a range of options from the proposal and advisory stages to hands-on work with students. And now – in collaboration with Frontiers for Young Minds – there will be the added opportunity to involve students in the important communication and review part of the scientific process.

Just as Frontiers for Young Minds believes that you don’t need to have a PhD to ask meaningful questions about cutting-edge research, GLOBE knows that you don’t need to be 18 to be a citizen scientist. These shared beliefs will help our two communities to bring together students and researchers together through even more of the scientific process!

What we hope the future holds:

• Members of the Frontiers for Young Minds community learning more about GLOBE and getting involved, whether as students collecting data or scientists expanding the portfolio of their outreach.

• Members of the GLOBE community learning more about Frontiers for Young Minds and getting involved, whether by serving as Science Mentors or writing Young Minds versions of their own published work.

• Encouraging authors who have used GLOBE data sets in their research to write Young Minds versions of their publications. This will enable students to read directly about the research they helped to make possible.

– By Amanda Baker