This summer many high school students have taken the opportunity to gain research experience through the Project STEM program to do hands-on work in a college setting.
Project STEM is a paid summer internship program which is a collaborative effort between the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS) and the Indianapolis Project STEM.
Anna Kim, a current junior in high school decided to explore psychology and became a camp counselor for Child Scientist Activity Week (C-SAW.) C-SAW is IU’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences summer camp for young children who are participants in research studies and organized by the developmental psychology faculty in the department. This camp is used to run a variety of experiments with children while entertaining them as well.
Kim was assigned to Dr. Linda Smith's lab to collect data on a project which involved the children's knowledge of place values such as counting by five’s, or ten’s. Kim’s role was to evaluate the data that they received each day from the children, while also work as a counselor for the camp.
“I’ll do the data coding of the videos of the kids or check the pre-test/post-tests of the kids, or they would have me scan papers for the experiments,” said Kim.
