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September 11, 2026
Teaching Students How to Think Like Researchers | Code Orbit
By Code Orbit
On September 10th, Afia Khanam led a 90-minute session with a full classroom of students at Magadh Higher Secondary School in Gaya, India.
None of it would have worked without the school's teacher, who translated every line in real time and supported the session at every step — from making sure the room was ready, to helping students follow along, to keeping the energy up for the full 90 minutes. That kind of support is easy to overlook from the outside, but it's the difference between a session that gets watched and a session that actually gets absorbed.
The goal was simple: help students take STEM and research seriously, early — not as something reserved for college or graduate school, but as a way of thinking they could start practicing right away. Over 90 minutes, students learned how to:
Explore academic literature
Develop meaningful research questions
How to conduct and analyze research
Follow ethical research practices
For most students in that room, this was the first time research was framed as something they could do now, not something that starts after a dozen more years of schooling. That's a bigger shift than it sounds like. Most students learn to memorize answers long before anyone teaches them how to ask a good question. This session flipped that order — starting with curiosity, then showing how curiosity turns into a question, a question into a study, and a study into something written down and shared with others.
We also talked about why the research process matters as much as the research topic. Knowing how to explore literature, form a real question, and follow ethical practice isn't just useful for a science fair project — it's a foundation for how to think through any problem, in any field, for the rest of a student's life. That's the part we hope stays with them longest.
We're not measuring impact by one session. We're measuring it by whether we show up again, by how many of these students go on to ask their own questions instead of waiting for someone to hand them one — and by teachers, like the one at Magadh Higher Secondary School, who make that possible on the ground every single day.
Thank you to Magadh Higher Secondary School, and especially to the teacher who supported this session in every way. We hope this is the first of many in an ongoing partnership. We hope this is the first of many.
None of it would have worked without the school's teacher, who translated every line in real time and supported the session at every step — from making sure the room was ready, to helping students follow along, to keeping the energy up for the full 90 minutes. That kind of support is easy to overlook from the outside, but it's the difference between a session that gets watched and a session that actually gets absorbed.
The goal was simple: help students take STEM and research seriously, early — not as something reserved for college or graduate school, but as a way of thinking they could start practicing right away. Over 90 minutes, students learned how to:
Explore academic literature
Develop meaningful research questions
How to conduct and analyze research
Follow ethical research practices
For most students in that room, this was the first time research was framed as something they could do now, not something that starts after a dozen more years of schooling. That's a bigger shift than it sounds like. Most students learn to memorize answers long before anyone teaches them how to ask a good question. This session flipped that order — starting with curiosity, then showing how curiosity turns into a question, a question into a study, and a study into something written down and shared with others.
We also talked about why the research process matters as much as the research topic. Knowing how to explore literature, form a real question, and follow ethical practice isn't just useful for a science fair project — it's a foundation for how to think through any problem, in any field, for the rest of a student's life. That's the part we hope stays with them longest.
We're not measuring impact by one session. We're measuring it by whether we show up again, by how many of these students go on to ask their own questions instead of waiting for someone to hand them one — and by teachers, like the one at Magadh Higher Secondary School, who make that possible on the ground every single day.
Thank you to Magadh Higher Secondary School, and especially to the teacher who supported this session in every way. We hope this is the first of many in an ongoing partnership. We hope this is the first of many.