Our Mission
The Society of Teen Scientists is your home for growing curiosity. Bigger questions about the world call for the scientific method - teenagers receive the tools, mentorship, and community to find things out. Publish. Discuss. Belong. For every curious teenager. Everywhere.
Brave New World
The economic advantage of test-passing skills and memorized facts is disappearing. AI can know. Memorize. Even reason.
But it cannot discover what no one has seen before. That remains human.
The future belongs to those who ask real questions and figure out how to answer them. Not learning about science, but doing it. Running real experiments. Finding things out.
Supporting the Curiosity
Every child is born curious. The education system supports them in asking, in exploring, all the way through elementary school.
Then questions get bigger, and there's no capacity with traditional methods to support every student anymore. Students stop asking. They start consuming and memorizing instead of exploring.
This was always a problem. Now, with AI changing every job, it's a crisis. The very skills students are trained in are the skills AI is replacing.
Some kids refuse to accept this. An estimated 100,000+ students in the USA alone are already doing research projects yearly, most with little to no guidance. And many more would explore what research is about, given the support and resources.
Technology Solves Technology Problems
Problems created by technology are solved by additional technology. (You may enjoy reading Science Past, Science Future, by Isaac Asimov where he showed how every major technology — fire, agriculture, road networks — introduced both advantages and challenges. Each time, the solution came from further innovation, not retreat.)
We can't undo AI's influence, however we can focus on using new technology's power to prepare kids for the future now: use AI to deliver well-designed pedagogy at scale. Research methodology refined over ten years, now available to every student.
Curiosity-Driven Research, Now Available to All
Real research has always been driven by curiosity: questions that fascinate, problems that won't let go. That's how science works.
Curiosity-driven research programs, where students pursue questions that fascinate them, learn the scientific process, and grow as thinkers, existed only at a few schools, gated by zip code. If your school didn't have it, there was no way to get it.
Now there is.
We created AI Research Mentor, purpose-built software for research guidance. Not a generic chatbot, but a full-fledged research mentor with modern pedagogy at its core, designed to elevate student thinking, not replace it. It guides students to pursue questions they care about using resources at hand.
Many self-driven students, or students with existing human support, will find this covers all their needs.
To complete the ecosystem, we also established a peer-reviewed journal where students can publish and learn the peer review process, a popular science magazine, and an annual conference.
Adding Human Support
Often human support is desired: community, practical skills training, or immersive mentorship.
For local community, we run Research Club, weekly gatherings for teenagers doing and interested in research. Students from various schools mingle and share. Currently in Princeton. More locations led by SoTS community in the future.
For practical skills, we offer Research Skills Courses: statistics, computational modeling, machine learning, microscopy, spectroscopy, and more. These courses help students build the technical foundation needed for their research projects.
For immersive, well-rounded research experience with direct mentorship and peer collaboration, we offer Research Labs.
Research Labs
SoTS Research Labs offer teenagers a chance to work within a group, regularly interact with peers, and receive direct mentorship from experienced research educators. Combined with 24/7 AI Research Mentor access, Labs provide a complete research experience with in-person (Princeton) and online options, and month-to-month flexibility.
Real, immersive, curiosity-focused research experience is now available wherever you live, whatever school you go to: public, private, or homeschool.
Wait or Act?
A gap between requirements of future work and the current education system already exists.
Traditional education will adapt, but may take a decade.
Teenagers are in school right now. They can benefit from this approach now - before they graduate, not after the system finally catches up.
We chose to act.