In April 2024, the primary and secondary school science and technology innovation competition unexpectedly entered the public eye from a report.
Fifteen graduate students from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications jointly reported that their supervisors had problems with teacher ethics and teaching style, including that two graduate students were sent by their mentors to help their daughters, who are in junior high school, participate in an innovation competition.
For a time, the authenticity of some primary and secondary school science and technology innovation competitions aroused public doubts. Netizens have posted the list of winners of other primary and secondary school science and technology innovation competitions, lamenting the professionalism of the name of the science and technology innovation project and the difficulty of scientific research it reflects.
Netizens even ridiculed these competitions as "proxy wars", which means that parents may participate in competitions for their children through improper means. However, the other side of the matter that cannot be ignored is that some primary and secondary school students have indeed been exposed to excellent educational resources since childhood, and have mastered a certain degree of scientific and technological innovation ability under the cultivation of schools and parents.
What projects can these students make, and how can schools and parents cultivate their scientific and technological innovation skills?
In the summer of 2023, a primary school student in Hefei assembles a robot in a science and technology class at the Children's Palace. Visual China
At the age of fifteen, he was already a "veteran" of science and technology innovation
In the fifth grade of primary school, Liu Si obtained an invention patent.
She is currently a sophomore and studying at a "New Ivy" college in the United States. When she was in the fifth grade, she was still studying in a primary school in Beijing, and in order to go to a better junior high school, her family planned to let her participate in some science and technology competitions to see if she could take the route of science and technology specialty. Before that, she had not been exposed to relevant knowledge, but she liked to build Lego since she was a child, and her hands-on innovation ability was good.
She wanted to invent a new type of mop. She observed that the existing mops on the market could only wipe the floor, not the baseboards, and this mop could meet the needs of both. She told the school's science teacher about this idea, and the other party affirmed her, and the teacher also helped her sign up for the "Little Academician" selection competition of the Beijing Juvenile Academy of Sciences.
Liu Si spent more than five months, consulting relevant information, to the market to observe various styles and models of mops, selected one of them for improvement, successively improved four generations, constantly updated the hinge style, and successfully produced a new type of mop with both functions. She remembers that some of the students who participated in the same competition made 3D printed headphones, some did research on the biology of orchid pollination, and some made soft obstacle crawling robots.
She feels that the advantage of her results may be that they are close to life. With this innovation, she won the first prize at the municipal level of the competition, was elected as a "little academician", advanced to the national level and won the first prize, and has since won several competition awards, including the third prize of the Beijing Fortune Peng Science and Technology Forum for primary and secondary school students. Her mother felt that this innovation was not easy to make, so she applied for a patent for her, and still keeps the relevant information of the project for her.
Yang Leya's eight-year-old son, a second-grade student, is currently preparing for the WRC World Robotics Competition, where he needs to go to interest classes every weekend to train, and then he needs to prepare for two other robotics competitions – from May to August, which are usually the main seasons for robotics programming-related competitions.
Generally speaking, robotics competitions mainly require participants to design and build robots through their mastery of robot programming languages to complete specified tasks. Yang Leya's son has learned programming languages such as Scratch and can drive robots to complete tasks through related programs.
In the first grade, he participated in the Shanghai Youth Robotics Knowledge and Practice Competition, and won the first prize in the city's primary school group, which examines the basic knowledge of robotics and artificial intelligence for students, and also includes allowing robots to complete corresponding tasks, such as obstacle racing, intelligent weeding, etc.
Thanks to several science and technology awards won in primary school, Liu Si entered his favorite junior high school as a science and technology student, and there were few competitions until high school. At that time, she was preparing for the college entrance examination and studying abroad, and in order to successfully apply for foreign universities, she began to participate in some international competitions in her first year of high school, such as the International Genetic Engineering Machine Competition.
The competition provided some learning materials, and more knowledge was learned by himself while doing experiments, but Liu Si had already laid a certain foundation in school. She is a student in the school's chemistry and biology competition classes, and she basically needs to soak in the competition class at other times of the week except for the normal class schedule. For example, she said, in the biology competition class, they need to spend a month to complete all the biology courses in high school, and then study biology in college.
In order to participate in the competition, Liu Si found several classmates from the school's international department to form a team together. She noticed that the students of the International Department usually have more diverse course content, some of them will take computer courses, can write code, and some can know art design. Liu Si said.
Liu Si and his classmates rented a laboratory in a science and technology park, spending an average of about 10,000 yuan per person. After completing his bachelor's and master's degrees at Peking University and Tsinghua University, he obtained a doctorate degree at Oxford University and completed the postdoctoral assessment.
Leos plans to use gene-editing technology to modify yeast genes. She usually likes to make bread, and once taught on station B, but found it difficult to accurately control the fermentation time, which affected the taste of bread. She hopes to develop a chrono yeast that can hibernate and stop fermentation after a certain amount of time through plasmid and vector construction experiments.
She shared her idea with the team and the lab teachers, and everyone thought it was feasible. They worked on this project for almost eight months. The experiment itself had a high failure rate, and she spent most of that summer in the lab, trying over and over again, sometimes while waiting for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), she just stared at the side and did her summer homework.
In addition to experiments, the competition also requires them to build a website to introduce the project, interview experts related to food safety, do business development planning for the project, and organize some educational activities. In the end, Liu Si and his classmates won the gold medal in the competition, as well as a best video award.
In his third year of high school, Liu Si also participated in an innovation competition, China Thinks Big, which is divided into "academic research projects" and "innovative action projects".
The team also includes students from the International Department of other schools, such as the International Department of Tsinghua University High School. These International Division students have learned about essay writing and can help. In addition to papers, their team also made popular science videos, brochures, art exhibitions, lectures, and songs, and the influence of the project was also included in the scope of the competition.
In the end, the paper submitted by Liu Si's team was successfully selected for the national forum, and after the defense, they were promoted to the global forum with the first place, at this stage, they needed to submit the English version of the paper, and finally, in this global competition, they won the bronze award.
The science and technology innovation competition for primary and secondary school students has a history of more than 40 years. The picture shows the Science and Technology Activity Hall of the Shanghai Youth Activity Center in 2016, where young members of the Youth Science and Technology Innovation Club can use various tools to make their own scientific and technological works. Visual China
Research courses, interest classes, summer camps......
As a student at a "double first-class" university, Song Yingshu is currently working as a teaching assistant in an elective course program at a middle school in Beijing. The middle school attaches great importance to the cultivation of students' scientific research ability, deliberately opens scientific research courses, and introduces university experts to the campus to guide students, and Song Yingshu's tutor is one of the experts.
When he first became a teaching assistant, Song Yingshu often felt shocked, but he didn't expect the academic training received by these students to be so standardized and solid, and they started so early, most of them were only in their first year of high school, and some were junior high school students. She felt a little behind, "I have worked hard for so long to study for graduate school, and the educational resources I have obtained may not be as good as the academic training obtained by high school students in Beijing. She said.
Song Yingshu introduced that from the perspective of teaching content, when teachers build an academic system for these students, they will start with basic literature search, teach them how to do literature review, how to find topics, what are the research methods, and even teach them how to take notes scientifically. Moreover, university experts themselves are very capable in incubating topics, as long as students communicate with them about their interests, they will take it seriously, and slowly guide students to think deeply and form a topic.
"Really down-to-earth step by step, every class is very dry (goods). Song Yingshu told Southern Weekend that she did not receive such meticulous and solid academic training when she was an undergraduate, and her supervisor preferred to acquiesce to them when she was a graduate student. ”
In addition, from the perspective of the whole teaching system, students have a very strict time optimization schedule, from the day before the topic to the research level at a certain stage, these teaching assistants have to follow up the whole process. They even know exactly who the student interviewed during a given week, how the interview went, and help them read their interview transcript to see if any adjustments needed to be made, "all of whom are helping him move the research forward."
Nowadays, this scientific research elective course is not free, and all the project fees are borne by the school and parents in half, plus the cost of additional materials generated by some research, it costs tens of thousands of yuan for a student. "But I don't think they're going to think about it [money]," Mr. Song said.
In addition to one class per week, students also have a weekly meeting with their advisor to report on their progress and communicate with each other, similar to the group meeting model of graduate students. Of course, students can also communicate with their instructors or teaching assistants at any time when they encounter difficulties after class, and the teachers will try their best to help.
Secretary Song Ying said that when a student was doing psychology-related research, the instructor knew a scholar who was deeply involved in this field, and specially invited him to share and give advice to the student through an online meeting. As a teaching assistant, Song Yingshu also sees the student's research process. During this period, under the guidance of the teacher, he read dozens of literatures, repeatedly revised two or three times when writing a review, and also wrote an observation diary and made model diagrams, and finally made a very mature research.
According to Song Yingshu, the academic research or innovative action results produced by these students will basically be used for the competition, some of which are international competitions, and some students' innovative works have even been selected for an international design week.
After staying in this scientific research elective course for a long time, Song Yingshu also observed that in addition to the students who take this kind of course, there is also a category of parents who want them to come. Parents usually take a long-term view, and doing these academic or innovative projects may be more beneficial for their children to apply to foreign universities.
As a parent, Yang Leya does not have too specific plans for the future of his children. However, she also learned that there are some science and technology competitions, such as the National Youth Informatics Olympiad, and the first prize winners are very likely to enter the national training team, and then obtain the qualification of Tsinghua University and Peking University.
In any case, she has also embarked on the road of cultivating children's scientific and technological innovation ability. When the child was 3 years old, he accidentally participated in a Haba thinking game competition held by an organization and won the first place. The teacher of the institution thought that the child was talented, and at the suggestion of the other party, Yang Leya sent the child to the institutional interest class to learn Lego and Haba logical thinking courses, and took two classes a week, each for two hours, and each class cost about three or four hundred yuan, until he was 5 years old. Later, he slowly transitioned to Scratch programming, and the children began to participate in robot programming competitions one after another.
"If it's more advanced, it's C++, which is a pure programming language, and we'll have to wait until next year. Yang Leya said. She also noticed that some children who take the international route - they are likely to apply to prestigious foreign universities in the future and have been preparing for some international robotics competitions since elementary school, such as the VEX robotics competition.
"From a utilitarian point of view, if you want to apply to a foreign university in the later stage, such as a 'Ivy League school' or something, how can you judge that the child's comprehensive ability is relatively strong? She also plans to send her child to learn programming languages when he is in the third or fourth grade.
Some parents will also cultivate their children's interest in science through summer camps and research camps, at least let them experience more first. Gao Zhijie works in the aerospace system, and his son is currently in his third year of junior high school. When he was in elementary school, Gao Zhijie had signed him up for the summer camp activities of "Mars Camp" for three consecutive years. This summer camp lasts about 12 days and is located in Lenghu, Qinghai.
In the summer camp, children can learn how to code, how to build and launch small rockets, and learn to build a Mars rover, the biosphere, and the summer camp teacher can provide guidance. When they learned to make rockets, before they went to Lenghu, the summer camp teacher first gave them ten online classes to let them understand the principles of rocket design and production, and then let them form a team to make scientific small rockets that can be recycled.
In the rocket design and production activities of that summer camp, Gao Zhijie's son was in charge of programming and modeling, and the rocket made by their team also won the first place in the "Highest Launch Award" with a flight altitude of 451 meters. After this event, Gao Zhijie signed up for the "Space Exploration Experiment" youth education project jointly sponsored by Qian Xuesen Space Technology Laboratory affiliated to the China Academy of Space Technology.
For this competition, she also specially borrowed a laboratory for her child in a double-first-class college, planning to let him do experiments every weekend. "If it's too expensive to build another laboratory yourself, a child's thing, if there is a ready-made laboratory, it's good to find a ready-made one. She said. Unfortunately, in the end, the child's project failed to be completed because of the failure of the team.
Yang Leya is also planning to let his son participate in research camps held by some universities in the later stage, such as Shanghai Jiao Tong University, so that he can get in touch with some science and technology related things, and then maybe he can try to participate in some science and technology innovation subject competitions.
"You say that he is not suitable to take the road (of science and technology), no one is sure how far he can really go, but there must be some gains in the process of learning," Yang Leya said, "I hope that after guiding him, he is interested, and then participate in the corresponding competitions, which is better for him." ”
(Liu Si, Yang Leya, and Song Yingshu are pseudonyms in the article)
Southern Weekly reporter Weng Rongrong and Southern Weekly intern Dong Jiadi
Editor-in-charge: Liu Youxiang