Bloom Clock/Class Projects

The Bloom Clock is a participatory research project with the goal of collecting bloom time data for the plants found in any particular region of the world. Participation is easy: it's just a matter of adding * to record a plant you've seen blooming today.

The Bloom Clock can also be used for class projects in schools and universities. While especially valuable for institutions with horticultural and agricultural programs, it can also be used as an assignment for ecology and botany classes.

Students may log flowers on the bloom clock, and a record of their logs will automatically be kept by the Wikimedia software. These records are freely available to any instructor who wants to review them personally, or perhaps the records could be looked over by other students and bloom clock contributors.

An example assignment would be to simply ask students to log 10 plants per week (this would entail perhaps 1/2 hour of looking around for flowers, and about 10 minutes logging, assuming they have access to a broadband connection). More advanced assignments might involve adding identification data or even constructing dichotomous keys using other features in Wikiversity's software.

If you are an instructor interested in using the bloom clock as part of your curriculum, please just sign below using an asterisk and 4 tildes ( * ), or ask a question on the talk page.