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.