“Wide variety of topics changed how I viewed not only research but learning and culture in general […]”
“This course changed my view of life… Of course writing and typesetting are important. But it was the storytelling, the discussions and lectures on ethics, what science is really like, and how biases work, that changed my values“
Summer 2026: the Institute will host the Research Skills Academy for a sixth season. Dates are set for July 6-23. We will operate virtually, with people from several cities participating from their location. The Academy’s goal is to prepare motivated high school (and very motivated middle school) students with skills needed to do research and advanced academic work. Students may sign up for the Research Skills Academy at the sign-up page. The Research Skills Academy is free, but space might be limited. You can also download a flyer at this link:
Questions? email: info@computinginresearch.org – phone: +1-505-629-0759 (voice only)
Table of Contents
Goals
Critical thinking: With the rapid shift in intellectual work caused by generative AI, critical thinking and research readiness are even more important.
Research technique: information assimilation, data analysis, visualization…
Academic awareness: career presentations on jobs and research in every major field. (Think anthropology, art, biology, chemistry, classics, computer science, economics, engineering, history, languages, linguistics, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, sociology, theater, …)
Tools: remove barriers between your ideas and the
final product.
Collaboration: students support each other and find help in the Academy and our larger community at the Institute.
Soft skills: communication, time management, project management, …
Case studies: maybe the most important part: tutoring and practice in carrying out in-depth case studies.
Writing in the content area: learn to write up research results, well as college, scholarship, and job applications, … Our tutorials on writing are based on cognitive theory, not on superficial style guides.
Personal or partnered projects: in addition to tutorials and lectures, students have much time to practice the skills and work on personal projects.
Giving presentations: most presentations are lousy. How do you go beyond that? Reading the room, giving talks that are not “reading bullet points”, slide preparation, …
Specificity: students list a top area of interest, and we pool guest-scientist and lecturer knowledge to prepare presentations on that topic.
Citizenship: understand under-representation, digital citizenship, software freedom, open source.
Testimonials
You can see what some former participants have told us about their time at the Research Skills Academy.
Logistic details
Dates/times in 2025: This is a 12-day course — Monday-Thursday of the three weeks of July 6, July 13, July 19.And times listed below are in the US/Mountain time zone. (Make sure you adjust the time if you are in another time zone.)
| 10:00am-11:15am | Main tutorial, worked examples, and case studies on our topics. |
| 11:30am-12:15pm | Discussion of topics in the tutorial and self-directed research work with collaboration in Academy’s cloud server. |
| 12:15pm-1pm | Lunch break. |
| 1pm-1:15pm | Scrum – guided conversation in which students update the other students on their work and progress. |
| 1:15pm-3:45pm | Individual (or self-formed small group) work. |
| 2pm-3pm | Lecture: either Institute colloquia, or career path lectures. |
Lecturers: lectures will be given by the community of researchers and scholars at the Institute for Computing in Research.
College credit: college credit will be given for the lecture series, as well as for the overall research experience. [this is not yet guaranteed: we are negotiating this now]
Support for individual projects: the Institute’s scientists and former interns will be available in chat rooms for support with research and computing problems.
Self-organized: the Academy (or RSA) is developed by students and is intended to foster independence. Researchers and former Institute interns are available, but keep to the offing unless intervention is needed.
Remote: the Research Skills Academy is remote, and people can participate from anywhere in the world. You can work from home, but we will let you know if other people from your city are participating, and we can contact your public library to help set up space for you to work with your local cohort.
Examples of research questions
Students will work on projects that involve looking at a question from many different angles. Different problems come with different angles of interest, but they almost always have several.
The topics below are just examples. Students can come up with their own projects, which should offer insights when analyzed through the lens of several academic disciplines.
The future of knowledge work
With recent success in generative AI, what is the ideal path for a youth who wants to work in knowledge or academic areas? What is the role of broad education and critical thinking in this new era?
Instant messaging and privacy
The situation: messaging solutions offered by companies (telecoms, social media companies, …) are riddled with privacy and security problems.
Students would research the topic efficiently and in a multi-faceted way. They would produce individual or group reports in which they analyze this question from several angles:
State of the market: what companies propose, why do companies offer zero-cost instant messaging? What is the real revenue flow of instant messaging? What products offer what features?
History: what is the historical arc of communications and the compromise of communications?
Real consequences: case studies of government or corporate intrusion that has caused damage.
Digital citizenship issues: is the customer really “the product” for these companies? How about “vendor lock-in”? How are the Free/Open-source solutions different?
Underlying tech: what is end-to-end encryption? How do the approaches of telegram and signal differ?
The science of deadly conflicts
Lewis Richardson did early work in studying the statistics of warfare. Students should rapidly research the findings of analytical studies of war data, and write a report. The report could look at this problem from several angles, including:
History: what is the historical arc of deadly warfare intensity? What are its milestones and what innovations do they relate to?
Statistics: how do you quantify this phenomenon in a way that gives useful insight? How can one explain the statistical distributions that come up in this study to a non-mathematical readership?
Visualization: what visualizations of this data bring home the important points discussed above?
Video games and game engines
angles: history, current tech for hardware, effect on evolution of hardware industry, current tech for software, psychology of video games, scope of the industry, sociology of generations, tales of the programmers
Art conservation, theft, and forgery
angles: chemistry, forensics, archaeology, history of art, style, computer analysis
Music: the art and the industry
angles: musician career biographies, style and genre, workings of recording studios, “follow the money” for label/artist interaction, Amanda Palmer and crowdfunding, owning media versus subscription approaches, …
Chaos theory in physics and economics
Born in studies of physical systems, how does chaos theory apply to understanding economic systems?
Brought to you by
Instructors at the Research Skills Academy, who have also developed its curriculum, have been:
| Andrea Bruno, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Institute for Computing in Research |
| Agustin Cespedes Sosa, Reed College |
| Mark Galassi, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Institute for Computing in Research |
The Research Skills Academy started in 2021, inspired in part by discussions with Santa Fe students.