Cogito.org: Science & Social Networking for Teens
Picture yourself as a smart kid living on a farm in the countryside, desperate to learn more about science and to share your love for science with others your age—but isolated by geography from educational resources and a peer community. That was Philip Streich's dilemma. And that's when he discovered Cogito, a free, content-rich website and online community for gifted teenagers passionate about STEM—short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
"Cogito brought me into a scientific community that I would otherwise never have had a chance to be part of," said Streich. "It motivated me to start doing research myself, [and] helped me picture myself doing research alongside them someday."
Patricia Wallace and her Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth colleagues who produce the website told Streich's story in a Science magazine essay. Why the honor of Science bylines for the Hopkins team? Cogito was a winner of the magazine's prestigious annual competition for the Science Prize in Online Resources in Education (SPORE), a contest designed to highlight excellence and innovation in Web-based science education. Science is a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"The award is invaluable to inform people about what Cogito can offer bright students interested in STEM," Wallace tells the Templeton Report. "It is also alerting scientists and mathematicians about how they can reach out to some very promising students."
That's because Cogito—Latin for "I think"—is a place where scientists and mathematicians conduct online workshops and hold discussions with young participants. It's an outreach that makes science—and scientific careers—seem more accessible to curious students aged 13 to 18. The site is also a safe online place where these gifted teens can meet and "geek out" with each other. In an interview posted to Cogito's YouTube channel, a Pennsylvania student named Brecken explains that social networking makes Cogito different from merely informational websites of its kind.
"What's special about Cogito is the sort of intellectual camaraderie that develops when we discuss these ideas with peers," Brecken says.
Adds Wallace: "On Cogito.org, age and location are no longer barriers. These young students can aspire to become top scientists and mathematicians—the STEM innovators of tomorrow."
Cogito launched in 2006, thanks in large part to a $2.5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. "Sir John Templeton asked us to think about ways that electronic communications technology could unite the world's brightest students. Through Cogito.org, CTY has created such a hub,"
explains Dr. Barnaby Marsh, who oversees the "genius" grants portfolio for the Templeton Foundation. "By providing a forum for ideas and discussion, the site has much promise in helping to inspire the next generation of creative leaders."
Winning the SPORE award has boosted awareness of Cogito both in the United States and around the world, Wallace reports. Advanced science and math students from 70 countries are part of the Cogito community, and are already forming social bonds that will no doubt pay off in closer professional collaboration when they begin their own scientific careers. In this way, says Wallace, online learning communities and resources like Cogito are at the leading edge of a technology-driven revolution in science education.
"This is particularly true for gifted students, especially those in rural areas who have few intellectual peers," she says. "Online, they can join students like themselves to pursue advanced coursework that truly matches their abilities, and they need not feel isolated or be held back by the lack of local resources. With mobile phones and tablets, they have easy access to their 'portal' to a world where their talents and passionate interest in science and math are celebrated and nurtured."
Physics at the Perimeter
A $2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation has laid the foundation for the new Templeton Frontiers Program at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Based at one of the world's leading physics institutions, the Templeton Frontiers Program will support postdoctoral researchers as well as collaborative efforts among top scientists, researchers, and physics students at every university level. The goal? To make major advances in quantum information and foundations, foundational questions in cosmology, and the emergence of spacetime.
"Together, Perimeter and Templeton are aiming to advance the way the most ambitious and original theoretical physics is done," said Dr. Neil Turok, Perimeter's director, speaking at the partnership announcement ceremony earlier this fall.
Dr. Hyung S. Choi, who directs the Foundation's mathematical and physical sciences program, praised Perimeter for its efforts to support "the next generation, the new generation of scientists."
"We believe, like Isaac Newton, that the great ocean of truth is still to be explored," Dr. Choi said. "We expect we will have a great partnership in the future."
Generosity and Genetics
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istockphoto/© Rosemarie Gearhart |
An Israeli research team has not only found evidence that children are altruistic, but also says this inherent generosity may be in part genetic. According to an October 11 report in the Wall Street Journal, scientists discovered that two-thirds of children in their experiment were willing to give away at least some of their stickers to children unknown to them who had none. A key discovery: many children in the team's experiment who did not display altruistic behavior share a variation of a gene, AVPR1A, that regulates a brain hormone tied to social behavior. The results were first reported this fall in the online science journal PLoS ONE.
The study was funded in part by the University of Notre Dame's Science of Generosity Initiative, a $5 million research program underwritten by the John Templeton Foundation.
The Israeli study adds to the fast-growing store of scientific literature on altruism in children. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, director of the Science of Generosity Initiative, told the Journal that researchers should track the altruistic children into adulthood to see if there is a connection between generosity and success. Two children in the experiment gave away all their stickers ("That's how you become happy," one child said). We should keep an eye on these two, said Smith; they might be saints-in-the-making.
