For the end of her 5th grade, my daughter had to complete something called the “capstone project” – meant to be a first original research project. She came up with what I thought was a rather original project: she wanted to look into “how does ESP work?" Her teacher didn’t seem to think so and suggested she find another topic. Katie batted around a few other ideas but it was clear that she wasn’t excited about any of them. I felt pretty strongly that her being excited about the topic was more important than pretty much anything else and wrote to the teacher to make that point. The teacher relented and Katie got to look into ESP.
It turns out that looking into ESP is a hugely fun topic that can teach kids a ton about science! That started with working on the question itself. With a bit of prodding, Katie came to realize that the way she had phrased the question had a huge assumption in it: that ESP exists and is a real phenomenon. So she wound up looking instead into how one might determine whether ESP exists. Here are some of the fun things she got to do along the way: read up on famous ESP frauds (she thought the idea of spoon bending was particularly funny), notice how deeply ingrained some idea of ESP is in culture (words such as "premonition,” tons of books, movies, etc), learn about probability (how easily can you guess a Zener card?), run her own experiment, participate in an experiment and interview a professor who has done some research on precognition.
The interview was with Prof. Daryl Bem who is emeritus at Cornell University. He took her interest seriously and spent an hour answering her questions. He did a terrific job explaining to an 11-year old the difference between questions that can be tested scientifically and those that cannot. I personally came away thinking that (a) the design of his precognition experiment is rather ingenious and (b) meets the requirements of a scientific experiment. One can argue about the outcome and how to interpret it, but this is a repeatable experiment and if I ever come up for some air (maybe this summer), I’ll code up a web version of it so that lot’s of people can take it.
The whole project further confirmed my belief that more than anything what kids need to learn is to be excited about a topic. So if your kids are looking for a research project and get excited about something offbeat such as ESP, I say roll with it!
