High School Research
 

As a hs sophomore who will be doing research at Purdue on Breast Cancer my junior year, I thought I'd ask what other projects people are doing as classes or as extracurriculars throughout highschool. Not so much 1 month or 2 month projects, but in depth study. :P. always nice to find another science geek.

Re: High School Research
 

My school has a relatively intense research program... senior year everyone who participates is expected to enter their project into competitions like Siemans, ISEF, and Intel. We frequently get semifinalists and finalists - quite a few in Siemans, only one semi in Intel, and a record three people this year got to go to seattle and participate in ISEF.

I personally didn't win anything this year, though. My project involved writing software for a virtual-reality juggling simulator. I basically used a stereographic camera to track the user's hands in 3D space and translated that to a virtual world inside the computer that contained the balls. The world was displayed using OpenGL. The idea is since the balls exist only inside the computer, you can adjust things like gravity and speed that you can't in the real world so you can learn the juggling patterns quicker.

Re: High School Research
 

Still that is one amazing project. The class that I'm taking is basically a research project class. A lot of students take jobs on campus, but it takes a lot more to volunteer time. Do you think a research requirement is good, or bad?

Re: High School Research
 

For the past year, I have been working at the University of Texas's Satellite Development Lab. I designed from scratch the communications system for one satellite and am now working on a six degrees of freedom inertial sensing unit.

-Bill

Re: High School Research
 

This summer i am taking classes "Automation and robotics" @ FAU which is building an autonomous bot... and programming a cnc machine... (FUN), "Web programming and National Security" (another interesting subject)... also a research program @ FAMU for a week... really looking forward to this summer for all these interesting classes... and research projects...