Beyond borders: Engaging high school youth internationally in research-based life sciences learning

A new article in OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology emphasizes the feasibility and importance of making research-based learning in life sciences available to high school youth internationally.

Gayane Ghukasyan, from Yerevan State University, Armenia, and co-authors Vardges Tserunyan, Mher Kurghinyan, and Lusine Hovhannisyan, independent scholars from Yerevan, report on their work on the International Group Project (IGP), which built on the International Biology Olympiad, organized in Yerevan in 2022.

The Olympiad is an annual competition for high school students around the world. The IGP research teams comprised 72 high school students from 32 countries who communicated in a digital environment via videoconferencing. Each team formulated a research question and created and presented a poster in-person to the public based on their research.

Completing the IGP involved forming new collaborations between colleagues with diverse cultural backgrounds and complementary skill sets. The authors formed teams with four students each, ensuring that no team included more than one student from the same country. This was done in order to achieve greater collaboration and intercultural exchange between students.

"This would help not only to introduce the students to an accurate reflection of how scientific research operates, but also aid in finding students who show promise as future researchers," stated the authors.

"The authors report their work on engaging with high school youth from around the world to expand research-based life sciences education upstream, to a high school stage. The paper has broad relevance to youth education in Omics systems science, integrative biology, and life sciences. The paper also cultivates new ways of thinking, for collective problem-solving across generations in the current era of climate emergency. Collective challenges in life sciences require collective solutions, and the findings in the paper are timely in this regard as well," says Vural Özdemir, MD, Ph.D., DABCP, Editor-in-Chief of OMICS.