Ginkgo Bioworks, the organism company, announced the launch of its pilot program to bring COVID-19 pooled testing to K-12 classrooms. The pilot is available to K-12 schools across the U.S. at no cost and kicks off January 4, 2021. The program is part of Ginkgo's COVID-19 testing service, Concentric by Ginkgo, designed to enable low-cost and large-scale testing for schools, businesses, and communities as they look to reopen. Classroom pooling has the potential to offer schools and districts population-level data to help make informed public health decisions at a fraction of the cost of individual testing plans. Ginkgo aims to work with hundreds of schools in this pilot to better understand and refine the logistics of scaling classroom pooling across the country. Ginkgo is particularly eager to work with schools that are willing to share insights and feedback on the process as part of a Citizen Science effort to enable greater testing access and empower teachers and their students to take on this critical step in pandemic mitigation firsthand.