AP Research, the second required class for students partaking in the AP Capstone program, is designed to teach students teamwork, research, and communication skills. The basic idea of AP Research is that students will study and gather research about a topic of their choosing for the whole school year, and write an in depth research paper of their findings that addresses their central question.
The program has now been at Steinbrenner for several years, and many students have begun to take these classes, as they strive to receive a AP Capstone diploma. Many of this year’s students have picked particularly interesting and unique topics ranging from health, to economics, to social issues, and much more.
Junior Kayleigh Murray, an AP Research student this year, is working on researching how people’s different characteristics will affect economic decisions, tested by using economic games. This revolves around the idea of game theory in economics, which is basically the study of how two businesses react to each other’s decisions.
There are three main “games” that Murray will use in her research, which involves putting her subjects in different economic scenarios. One of the three is very well known and is called the “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which participants must decide whether they want to cooperate with each other to get a low amount of time in prison, or whether they will choose to turn each other in to try and get the best outcome for themselves.
Murray will be testing different Steinbrenner students and taking note of their different characteristics to see if there are any correlations with how they play the games. A few of these characteristics include age, race, gender, GPA, and whether or not the student has a job.
“The main characteristic that has been researched already is gender. There has also been studies on how circumstances affect the outcomes of the games and culture is another big one. But other than that, I haven’t been able to find much on economic characteristics for this kind of study,” said Murray.
Junior Emma Lucke, another AP Research student this year, will be testing the theory that there is a correlation between couples and phenotypic similarities. After finding research about facial similarities between many old couples, she also wanted to look into how this fits into incest.
“I wanted to see if the current cultural taboo of incest has to do with it, since there are theories that phenotypic similarities are becoming less prominent, since people don’t want to look like their partner. It is more likely though, that someone could like someone more because they look like them,” said Lucke.
One way Lucke may test this theory is to have high school students take images of themselves and morph it with another image set, that will have varying degrees of similarity. For example, using the same original base image, and morphing it with an image that has ten percent versus fifty percent similarity, and seeing which one the students prefer.
To find out the end results of their research projects, check their follow-up articles online at oraclenewspaper.com towards the end of the year, to learn about their findings, and hear their takeaways from their projects.
Grace Becker// News Editor
