Study about teen screen time addiction, and its effects on 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! 

Interested in Computational Research work? The Wolfram HS Research Program is a wonderful resource!

 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! 

Two new animated resources for Elementary Teachers: A Science story and...EELS?!?!

 I am breaking out two new animated resources that are most useful for elementary teachers. 

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. 

The second resource has to do with Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL. Most schools in the country have made it a goal, at some level, to bring in more SEL to deal with some of the issues we've been dealing with with children and teenagers since the Covid pandemic, specifically mental health issues. But SEL has become politicized and is under attack in many regions of the country, and has begun to be frowned upon by many educators. The trouble is, the skills described and contained in traditional CASEL SEL are actually essential life skills any parent would want their children to be strong in, in order to have a healthy and successful life! I am proposing and pushing for a re-branding of SEL to EELS - Everyday Essential Life Skills needed for success! This is a short booklet with animated pages that introduce and define what the EELS are, and I ask all who are parents to decide if the skills shown are part of "left wing indoctrination", or if they are skills you yourself use every day of your life, and are skills any parent would want their kids to know and be strong in. I have yet to find anyone who does not want kids to be strong in the listed skills!