Teens and screen time addiction - how it affects mental health

 A huge concern many of us have had regarding the amount of time teens are on screens (primarily cell phones), is the effect on things like attention and motivation and engagement in school, but also the effect on one's mental health in general. This article summarizes a recently published study of America's teens. 

For those interested in this from a research perspective, if you dig into the actual study and the surveys used, perhaps you can do your own study(ies) regarding screen time more locally, and work with math teachers to do a statistical analysis - is your own school consistent with national results or not? What steps can your school do to help students with screen addiction, both for the short- and long-term? How do results vary with age and grade level? By gender and race, or socioeconomic status? Be thinking about how you can take research that has been done by others and in other contexts, and then build on it to make it a little different and original...then experience the real scientific process as you dig into it! 

Get MANY ideas for computational projects from Wolfram site!

 The Wolfram High School Science Research page, of course totally in the realm of computational science research, is magnificent for getting ideas from just about any field of STEM. Each project, listed since 2018, has code (Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha) and write-ups on the work. It is a wonderful inspiration for any high school student who is into coding and computational work! Well done! 

Animated STEM story for grades 1-3, introducing atoms all the way down to quarks

 The first is a STEM story I wrote some years ago, but just had the text. It is titled Little Sue and the Rock, and is a story for children in grades 1-3. The goal is to introduce to younger children the concept of atoms, and what atoms are made of. It goes through electrons, and a nucleus, and then that a nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. But then it introduces the fact that protons and neutrons are made of still smaller pieces called up and down quarks! Quarks are typically unknown even to high school science classes, and therefore high school students, which seems silly to me since I think it is fundamentally we present the most basic ideas of what the world is made of in simple, and accurate, terms. 

Computational Science Research: Climate modeling example

 This is one of my favorite TED talks, where Dr. Schmidt does the best job I've seen explaining what a climate model is, how they create the model, how they test the model, which leads to confidence in using the model to predict future climates based on different initial conditions one feeds into the model. Nicely done, and this is something I wish we could show all skeptics and naysayers, who simply do not understand the process and science that goes into this type of scientific research. 

Intro to developing research questions from everyday phenomena: Hydraulic jump

 This is a short video that demonstrates a simple way teachers can introduce a research-geared approach to simple, everyday phenomena. In this case, it is the hydraulic jump. We see this daily any time one turns on a sink faucet, and that stream of water hits a hard surface and flows out in a smooth, circular manner - but at some radius, the water level 'jumps' up and goes into turbulent flow. 

By having students spend 5 minutes pouring water on a hard surface, and thinking about and listing any and all possible variables or parameters that may have an effect on the jump, one can quickly come up with a double-digit list of possible experiments you can try, and investigate under more controlled conditions the effect of this or that on the jump: flow rate of water, height from which you pour the water, temperature of the water, falling on a horizontal surface vs an angled surface, if the water stream falls on just a smooth surface or if there is an object it hits and flows over, if there are two streams of water and the jumps interact, changing the surface the water lands on, and so on. All of these can be turned into research studies! 

Always new things to discover in the sciences!! We need the curious to continue to search and ask questions!

 An article in Science News the other day made me think again about how there have been times when scientists thought a whole field of study may be 'dead', because they knew everything about it! The article was about a massive gas cloud in space that was just discovered and identified - while this sort of thing happens frequently in astronomy, what stands out is it is just 300 light-years from earth. This is like a few doors down the street when it comes to astronomy because this is really close. 

This cloud was hiding right in front of our faces, it appears! It has a mass of about 5500 Suns, and its chemical composition just happens to be one that was difficult to detect. Astronomers have peered through that patch of space countless times over the past few centuries, and still there is something right there! 

In every field of STEM, this is a reminder we will never discover and understand everything, and there will always be a need for the curious and determined minds of youth to come up and keep the quest for knowledge and understanding and curiosity alive! 

'Frustration' objects - mismatched geometric shapes lead to objects with interesting propoerties

 This is a neat study out of the U. of Michigan, where researchers used natural structures made from a variety of different, and often complex, shaped pieces. Interesting properties of the structures result, from really hard shells to flexible, but strong, objects. 

This could be a cool type of study to do for those with 3-D printers, where you can try to find interesting shaped pieces to build complex, but useful, structures and objects.