A glimpse into our programs:
Many ask us what our programs actually look like. Here’s a short video showing the hard work of one of the groups from Head Royce School on Donner Summit studying biodiversity. After watching, read on to hear more about how these research projects are developed by our students during their time in the program.
How students develop their research:
We are big on asking questions. So, during a program, we provide some pre-program reading to give background and context to the concepts we’ll be working with. Then, we introduce students to the research methods commonly used to study those concepts. From there, the possibilities are endless. We gently guide students to form and test their own questions surrounding the research topic. But, mostly, they do it on their own! We are frequently amazed seeing what they come up with to study.
During our Fall 2019 program with Head Royce, our Executive Director Meg had this to say about the kids’ projects:
“One thing that I was most impressed with was the diversity of questions from the same introduction. The kids really went in different directions and the teachers really helped us honor that. The kids asked a huge variety of questions during the question asking time. I thought it was going to be hard to narrow down, but there were some kids that really knew what they wanted to study. I was impressed that they all were able to take their specific topic and talk about how it fits into the health of the ecosystem. I liked that they got that there are a lot of different ways to assess ecosystem health depending on the ecosystem and what you are looking at.”
