You say that as if it's a bad thing. The thing you seem to be complaining about is one of the wonderful things about parenting. I.e. to impart/share/teach/give what you have accumulated over your life. Whether that is something physical, or intangible such as knowledge, makes no difference.

To a certain extent, this happens in many other ways at schools as well. I mean, those kids with very athletic, or sports oriented, parents, may be more driven or have better guidance in athletic endeavors that would my kids. But we seem not to care about that (until the parents are screaming during a game).

And likewise with music, or art, and so on. So I think I've decided not to get too concerned about how others might view my daughter's work on her project. It would be unfair (to her) if I decided not to give her explanations that were the benefit of my own experience.

That doesn't mean that it's a purely good thing for society. It is the societal perspective that timr most likely had in mind.

A thought experiment: If Bill Gates decided to recruit the top 10,000 maths teachers in the world and shutter them away in a warehouse to perfect the ideal maths lessons solely for his children, would just be "one of the wonderful things about parenting"?

That's not true. I've seen better (original) science fair work than some PhD theses. It's just 1/1000 students that can pull it off.

For me, science fair was the only thing that kept me going to school. (Indeed, I dropped out the next year when I was disallowed from competing.) The project that got me to the nationals was about comparing the efficacy of genetic algorithms against neural networks in a game playing task (with a multi-machine, networked simulator); looking back, it was a big mess, and there was a lot of dumbness (that, if I had had even one mentor, could have been rooted out), but it wasn't dissimilar from unambitious master's projects in the CS department at my local university. Many projects at the national level were much more sophisticated.

Like any school competitions (does the author think math and programming contests are any different?), people with ambitious parents who push their children, and especially children in private schools (that often dedicate class time to working on these competitions), have a massive presence at the higher levels. But what's nice is that you don't have to have any of that to get to those higher levels, either. Motivation is a funny thing.

Of course they can. I do graduate research in quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics. You can easily do research-class DFT work with a personal computer, open source software, and a strong drive to learn. It's done all the time.

Granted, I use Titan for my largest simulations, but I've gotten publications out of work done solely on my Macbook Pro.

Any high school student can download free software. That's not a question. Almost none can understand the math (I say "almost" because I'm sure there's some child prodigy out there who can; the exception makes the rule), and fewer still can conceptualize a question within the field that counts as scientific research.

The few (if any) prodigies who can surmount those hurdles are, by definition, already graduate-level researchers in the field, and are not piddling around with high school science fairs.

See this is the point I disagree with. I think plenty of high school students can understand the math necessary to do cutting-edge scientific research. No need for child prodigies at all.

Maybe for work that's Nobel prize winning or something, but your average run-of-the-mill PhD student? I imagine tons of 14-18 year olds are capable of it.

I was writing my own Metropolis light transport programs when I was 17 by looking up articles on WoS and Google Scholar. Now I'm doing the same kind of thing -- just with MD instead. I don't think I've become any more intelligent since high school (or even that much more knowledgeable), and in fact, I was probably better at focusing back then than I am now since I didn't have so many distractions in my life. There's nothing atypical about me; I'm nowhere near the level of "genius", and I was not a child prodigy. So yes, I'm quite sure of my statement.

There are two "cans" here; a high school student can do graduate-level scientific research from a techniques standpoint, like implementing a program for X or solving equation Y. But very few can do the interesting hypothesis generation aspect of graduate school.

I actually started in MD, though from a physics/math/CS background. I didn't understand the biology at all, and while I implemented a parallelized version of CHARMM back in 1992 (using PVM 2.x, no less), so was certainly capable of understanding the math and doing cutting-edge scientific research, I couldn't have come up with that research topic on my own.

Being unable to come up with an interesting research topic :) I left MD, did bioinformatics for a bit, and for the last 16 years I've been doing cheminformatics. The first 10 years was as a practitioner, and the last few years as an actual researcher, albeit self-funded. Implementation and research are different things. The younger me could have done all of the programming I do now, and the math is no more advanced than what's taught at the junior level of college, but didn't know the history of the field to identify what was actually cutting-edge vs. a technique described 20 years previous in the literature.

The current me, now with decades of experience in writing molecule-oriented software, and having read many articles across the 75 year history of the field, has found where there are interesting areas for new research.

The article says "students [with two exceptions] struggle with their projects because they lack inquiry skills, motivation, and an ability to reflect on what they’ve learned." I'm not sure I could convince the high school version of me to understand that subgraph isomorphism coupled with subgraph enumeration could be use to implement a groupwise maximum common subgraph, which can be used to identify a common scaffold for 2D depiction of a cluster of structures. There are a lot of intermediate steps to put it all together.

(In fact, I implemented this problem in the late 1990s, using a straight-forward backtracking algorithm from the 1980s. My newer version from 4 years ago is not only more clever and sophisticated, it's also a new algorithm.)

Nor should we expect a high school student to dig through the papers from the 1970s, which is the last time something like this approach was taken, figure out why it was put aside for several decades, and identify its connection to frequent subgraph mining. But it is something that we would expect from a graduate student.

FWIW, my most advanced high school science project was to build a radio telescope from an old clock radio and makeshift Yagi antenna. I managed to detect the sun. I also wanted to build a mass spectrometer, but couldn't get better than 1mm of vacuum out of an A/C vacuum. For government class, on the topic of the Strategic Defense Initiative, I built a railgun that could shoot about 2 inches using a few spools of wire, some old relays, and a borrowed power supply. Had I access to a school labs, mentors, and more than about $20 to spend, I could probably have had a much better science project.

Instead, I was part of the "vast majority of kids who get few resources beyond their parents." (Which came in handy when I wanted to get the glass cut for bottle I used for my mass spec. The owner of the glass store knew my grandfather from when both lived in Cuba, and cut the holes for free.)

I don't think any of those projects helped my greater understanding of science or doing research, which was the supposed goal of the science fair in the first place.

And it does seem like every new idea I think of has already been done in some form when I start searching for it. I thought I had discovered a new kind of interaction between hydrogen and lithium the other day. I did a search for articles between year 2000 and now -- nothing came up. I was really excited until I lowered the starting search year to 1980 and discovered the entire concept had already been exhaustively researched in the early 90s, and now there's not much more to say about it.

So yes, you're right; that would be difficult for a high school student.

I'm actually a math graduate student, and I've been thinking about how capable a high school student would be of doing math research. This started because two years ago, I was asked to facilitate a summer program for gifted high school students that opens up the possibility of math research for high school students. Interestingly, this too suffered from some of the problems highlighted in the article. Many of the students who got into this program were clearly parentally guided, and they floundered. But many were not, and did really well.

This last summer, I had a pair of students particularly interested in cryptography [I'm a number theorist, and some of my bias comes through]. There is plenty of intersection between content a high schooler can understand and cryptography research, especially if it's interest-driven instead of industry-driven [I don't want to get into trials and travails of cryptographers here].

Would their ideas make money in the "real world of cryptography?" No. But they would make fantastic science fair projects, and they would especially benefit from several months of work instead of the 6 weeks that we had.

tldr; I agree with you. A good number a of high schoolers are capable of performing research.

I understand this because I once ranked in the top 10 in my state for mathematics when I was a kid. So I potentially could have understood specialized maths if they were explained to me, sure, but where would I have gotten that exposure?

When I was in school, there was no Google Scholar or Wolfram or edX. We had EBSCOhost, but the librarian only knew how to pull up old issues of Forbes and Sports Illustrated. My generation's great boon was that we would grow up to live in a world where we would have free access to educational materials and other wonderful information over the internet.

I'm not making this an argument about privilege, but we should deeply consider whether our resources and backgrounds were so typical as we believe them to have been that any child put in our place would have had our abilities.

Granted, she's teaching a gifted class at a top ranked (public) elementary school, but still -- that many fifth graders know how to program for iOS or Android? I was surprised.

So I think your point is spot on. The next generation is going to "grow up to live in a world where we would have free access to educational materials and other wonderful information over the internet." The "could" will turn into a "can".

I have a job, and lots of other obligations. Quite frankly, I don't really care if she wins the science fair or not. I suspect that if she decides to compete when the time comes, she'll have a good shot at it just because of the level of effort we put into education and the equipment we have around the house. The majority of my free time and money is spent on this, so we have a lot of unusual stuff.

It's easy to put that kind of effort into your own kids, because they live with you. They're around for all of your spare moments, and they can use equipment you have access to that demands close supervision. Now here's the part that's relevant to your comment - I'm also heavily involved in her school, trying to do as much as I can for all of the other kids who are interested (the topics are computer science, math, and robotics). I get to spend maybe two hours a week working on that, after my other obligations are taken care of. It's simply not possible for me to do more for the school, and even if I could the problem is concentration of resources. Given a certain budget (time and money) that I have available for this project, it's obvious that I can make a large difference for a small number of kids, or a small (forgettable) difference for a large number. Taken to the extreme, I can make an enormous difference for one kid (mine). No matter what I try to do, I'll never be able to make that kind of difference for even a small classroom full of kids, and certainly not a whole school. So I'm left with this choice: Do I spend my resources in a pursuit that's likely to be ultimately fruitless (i.e. trying to "raise all boats"), or do I spend it on something I have a very high chance of success with? Which of those is more wasteful? My answer is that I do the best I can for the school, but I feel no guilt about giving more to my own kids.

In the end, if my daughter ends up winning a science fair it's going to look exactly like a case of inherited privilege, and maybe that's what it is. That's not because I'm trying to hold down everyone else though, it's just a simple matter of logistics. If I could give that kind of boost to everyone, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

My experience indicates otherwise. It's rare, to be sure, but it does happen.