Reply to How can teenagers create such science projects?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "How can teenagers create such science projects?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NP. The science fair kids always have mentors. Usually they are paid and do most of the work while explaining to the kids what’s going on. I learned this when someone my DD looked up to placed in a science fair.

Now I know another kid who placed in last year’s state science fair who did not have a mentor. Or so he says. Dad is in tech. Son is really not that intellectual and cannot tell how why he started the project or what he did. I suspect dad (works at Microsoft) did it.[/quote]

People that work at Microsoft are allowed to have kids and they're allowed to teach their kids about data and data collection and how to clean up data and how to manipulate data and how to analyze data.  Presumably someone taught the person working at Microsoft those skills and they are allowed to teach them to someone else.

Pretty sure Venus Williams is allowed to teach her kid how to play tennis and Taylor Swift is allowed to teach her kid how to compose a song and Stephen King is allowed to teach his kid how to write a story.[/quote]

But Venus Williams would not be allowed to go play a game for her kid so kid can win a medal, right? There’s no equivalence here! [/quote]

That and Venus Williams started training at the age of 4 and played in her first official pro tournament was at 14. It took her 10 years to train to that level and I’m sure it was 40 hours a week or more.

Are you telling me your kid started data science, IoT, web technologies and environmental science in elementary school and got to professional level at the age of 14?

Spare me from this BS. I know how long it takes.[/quote]
The level of time required to become world class in one of the most popular activities in the world is very different from the level of time required to be able to do research that wins a competition for high school students [/quote]

No. Research is serious business that takes years to learn the trade. From acquiring basic competence in the subject, to being able to even read conference/journal papers to understand what has been done, that typically requires at least a few graduate-level classes. The individual then needs to come up with ideas that can potentially advance the state of the art, realize those ideas by designing/performing experiments or developing a theory, and turn the results obtained into publishable papers that can fend off criticisms from reviewers. That's a long journey filled with blood, sweat, and frustration dotted with occasional Eureka moments. Can a high schooler do it in an independent fashion? Sure, there are Bill Gates, Terrence Tao, and the likes among us, but they are 1 in 100,000. Not 1000 in 100,000 who apply to top schools each year and claim to have done published research.[/quote]

You need to relax.  There are over 3 and 1/2 million kids that come out of high school every year and a very small percentage of them are interested in science research at all.  Of the very small number some do poor quality projects, some do average quality and some do high quality projects.   You've got yourself in a snit over a tiny amount of high school kids.

[/quote]

That was a new poster, not the one who commented about MS and replied to you about Williams. You are now trying to generalize — all I was saying, that you commented on, was that this kid’s dad seems to have done the work as the dad is in the same field and I’ve been working with the kid on other stuff. Do you know what the kid wants to do with his life after all this research? Become a “coder”. That is it! He dies not want to continue his research this year and could not tell me if he could enhance what he had already done. I think there may be kids who can do it on their own (I do not know), but this kid is NOT one of them. Parents are obsessed with HYPSM so this might have been their contribution.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics