‘Good Research’ Conducted by Talented High School Students: The Case of Sci-Tech

Abstract

In this paper, we present SciTech, the summer international research program for talented high school students, organized in the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology [1] [1] The first author of this paper is proud of founding SciTech in 1992 when he was the head of the Harry and Lou Stern Family Science and Technology Youth Center at the Technion. Information on the various activities of the Youth Center aimed at promotion of excellence and interest in mathematics, science and technology of high school students can be found in the website of the Technion ( http://www.mechina.technion.ac.il/en/index.html ) . Our major thesis is that while taking part in scientific projects under supervision by the Technion research stuff, the high school participants in SciTech are given the opportunity to work as researchers, and not just as learners. We begin with a brief discussion of the term ‘good research.’ This is followed by a description of SciTech: we outline how students are accepted to the program and what they do in it. The main part of this paper is devoted to discussion of some, not necessarily the most successful, mathematical projects, which we had the pleasure to supervise. We conclude the paper with general observations concerning the projects, based on our experience as SciTech mentors.