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 — 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 available 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 in which he shows 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 accessible to every student.
How We Made Research Accessible and Affordable
Real research has always been hard to access. Expensive. Reserved for the few. Many people don't even know such research is real and happening at high schools — while some schools have been doing this as part of their standard curriculum for decades.
During our years of guiding research we identified that the real bottleneck is not in access to equipment (as often stated by others) but rather availability of high-quality mentorship. A huge variety of legit research projects may be done with regular equipment already available in the majority of high schools, with equipment easily purchasable on eBay, with the real world being a lab.
We created highly affordable software capable of handling most typical research guidance. This is not some random AI chatbot. This is a full-fledged research mentor, with modern pedagogy at its core, designed to elevate student thinking — not replace it, and guide a student to address questions they are interested in using resources at hand (including helping match questions to available resources).
Many self-driven students — or students who have minimal human support already — will find this covers all their needs.
To enable a complete and cohesive 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. But there are no reliable directories for independent research educators experienced with teenagers. We established SoTS Educators Circle to connect families with educators who share our philosophy. These educators have access to AI Research Mentor's Educator interface — allowing them to offer more effective and affordable research guidance. Their students can subscribe to AI Research Mentor for 24/7 support between sessions. Various price points. No long-term commitments.
Well-Rounded Research Experience
SoTS Research Labs is our way to offer teenagers a chance to work within a group, regularly interact with peers, and get periodic input from human mentors. We only engage highly skilled mentors who are able to organize efficient group interactions (while 1:1 mentoring is easier to guide, it does not provide the same level of pedagogically valuable peer learning). That, combined with 24/7 AI research mentor access, provides a research lab experience with easy access and month-to-month flexibility with no practical alternatives.
Labs is our premium offering, providing an experience not found anywhere else - while sustaining affordable access for all.
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.