Project: Sharks

Citizen Science - An initiative to enable everyone to participate in a scientific process.

Problem:

We would like to provide students the opportunity to experience the process of finding, measuring, and doing statistics on shark teeth, without needing to acquire expensive supplies.  We want to create a "virtual fossil dig" which will allow students to get a similar experience by through their browser.

How it Works:

From the homepage, users can click on the "Start Digging!" button to be directed to the main game panel.  15 Shark teeth will be randomly scattered across a background of "fossil dirt."  Not all of the dig area is visible at once, so users will need to scroll around using the arrow keys or scrollbars.  Once a user sees a tooth, they can click it, at which point it will disappear from the game window and reappear in an inventory panel.  Once all 15 teeth have been discovered, the user can progress to a measurement page where they try to fit each tooth into the smallest circle that completely encloses it.  Once all teeth have been measured, the user progresses to a statistics page, where the size distribution of the teeth they have measured is compared against the size distribution of all of the teeth in the database.

Future Work:

• Add an "I give up" button which highlights remaining teeth so that they can be found
• Zoom in/out functionality 
• Better interface
• More backgrounds
• Provide more information about the shark teeth and sharks they came from
• Class / group functionality - compare your teeth statistics against the entire class

Demo Site

Screencast

Presentation

Github

Created By: 

Remington Campbell, William Pruett, Eric Anderson, Daniel Alley, Kevin Reed, Derek Schreiner