Like many New Jersey shore communities, Gandy’s Beach was devastated by Hurricane Sandy. The solution? Engage school communities in a real-world restoration project: Building a living breakwater from bags of old shells to protect both oyster beds and shoreline from future storm damage.

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Filed under: K-12 Education News, K-12 Outreach Programs, Special Features | Comments Off on Gimme Shell-ter

Tags: beach restoration, citizen engineering, Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental science, Hurricane Sandy, living reef, National Fish and Wildlife Service, Nature Conservency, oyster beds, Programs for Students, Project PORTS, resilence, Rutgers University

When Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010, Notre Dame engineering researchers created an online system that let students review hundreds of photos and reliably classify the structural damage. The effort is just one example of how “citizen engineers” and “citizen scientists” are advancing research in areas from astronomy to air pollution to penguins. Even snowflakes!

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Filed under: Special Features | Comments Off on Citizen Engineers

Tags: Bumpass Cove, citizen engineering, Citizen Science, crowdsourcing, Environmental science, Flint water crisis, Great Backyard Bird Count, NASA GLOBE Observer app, Notre Dame. Haiti earthquake, RoboSub, UAV, Virginia Tech