If we did not have social media, then teenagers and young adults would be more productive because social media affects students' ability to focus and utilise their time.

We will be conducting this experiment on students aged 8-14.

DAY 1

-Show students a youtube video with clips of cute cats that is around five minutes in length. 

-After, hand out a questionnaire/activity that will take MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES TO COMPLETE.

-Let students know that they will not be able to finish within the five minutes that you have allotted, but that they can still BEGIN WORKING ON IT because it will be homework.

-Students should NOT be told to sit still, be quiet, or be made to work so that you can easily tell who is using their time wisely/productively, and who is not.

-Record how many students were working and how many were not working, and the gender and age of each student.

DAY 2

-Repeat the same steps as in day 1, but leave out the video.

-Compare the results of the two days.

To begin the project we first researched the definition of productivity, which we found was " Productivity… measures how efficiently production inputs, such as labor and capital, are being used in an economy to produce a given level of output" (Paul Krugman, 1994)  

After getting started on that we checked the stats, and attempted to figure the amount of screen time. We had concluded it must be a lot, or else it would not make sense for people to be so interconnected with it just to use it for around a half hour each day. Some interesting things we found were how stats differed between gender, age, and were even greatly affected by the recent pandemic. For example, we discovered how around ¾ of girls dropped physical activity over covid, while boys activity dropped, but then rebounded close to 2022. Therefore we were able to safely state that screen time and physical activity were connected. Afterwards we discovered the amount of screen time the majority of those aged 8-25 h=utilize daily, which is around 7 ½ hours. Considering each tik tok video is around 38.3 seconds long, we managed to calculate that one person can view around 900 videos a day if they used social media to such a great extent. 

Next we brainstormed different reasons for teens to want social media, and how even though the effects of it are bad they continue to utilize it. We concluded on vulnerability.  When a teenager, whose mind is already so socially oriented, posts a picture, this anxiety is emitted; a social anxiety which can easily ruin one's mind, one could call it a thirst for approval. Then, when said person is given a few likes, they receive a dopamine rush- almost a kind of reward for having people 'approve' you. This dopamine desire grows, leading to more posts, and more scrolling, therefore said person unconsciously forms an addiction to social media.

This led us to examine how dopamine works. Dopamine is a form of neurotransmitter which is sent to four pathways in the brain:   Mesocorticol. tuberoinfundibular, mesolimbic nigrostriatal, however we will be focusing on the mesolimbic for this research. The mesolimbic dopamine pathway is connected to the amygdala (which primarily controls emotion) and the hippocampus (which primarily controls learning, and memory). One could imagine how drastically dopamine can affect such characteristics. When one is on social media, dopamine is released into the same parts of the brain which are activated by drugs and alcohol. This can prove a great problem when considering that everyone has 24/7 access to this 'drug,' it is infinite, and AI specially chooses things that will supposedly give one the biggest rush, aka, more dopamine.  

Finally we looked at some more stats, and found these three common percentages in multiple sources. We discovered 97% of teens use social media everyday, 46% use it almost constantly,  and 54% of teens would find it hard to give up social media. Our research may extend a bit further in the following weeks as we build our trifold, however what is mentioned in this paper is the majority and overview of it all.

The results based on the experiment we conducted are as follows:

Grade 4, day 1: 5/25 students did not work (video)

              day 2: 4/25 students did not work (no video)

grade 3, day 1: 5 students were distracted (video)

              day 2: All students were working (no video)

grade 5, day 1: most students working (louder, more talking)

             day 2: most students working (quieter environment, less talking)

grade 6, day 1: most students talking, distracted

             day 2: students more quiet, fewer were distracted

grade 8, day 1: 10 students were working (video)

             day 2: 14 students were working (no video)

Does social media affect the productivity of students? The results of our experiment demonstrate that after being shown the youtube video, students were louder, unfocused, and did not work as well as on day two of our experiment, where fewer students talked, and more were working. This outcome goes along with our hypothesis, therefore social media does impact the productivity of students aged 8-18.

Krugman, P. (n.d.). Defining and measuring productivity. DEFINING AND MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY. https://www.oecd.org/sdd/productivity-stats/40526851.pdf

Government of Canada, S. C. (2023, November 17). Physical activity and screen time: Pandemic effects, and other key numbers. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/4989-physical-activity-and-screen-time-pandemic-effects-and-other-key-numbers

Swink, S. (2023). The effects of social media on teenagers. Youtube. Retrieved 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl-TJyPK                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

 Laura Ceci, L. (2023, November 14). TikTok video duration by views 2023. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1372569/tiktok-video-duration-by-number-of-views/

Why scrolling on social media is addictive. (2023). The Washington Post. Retrieved 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rooEBjZWpDc.

We would first like to thank all our experiment participants for their contribution, all the teachers who helped carry out our experiment, and who gave us feedback (Thanks Mr. Orr!), and the Mrs. Lawrence who did not get mad at us when we had to call our parents every science class. Thanks to our parents/sister who also did not get mad for being phoned every science class, and who put up with us when we asked for study groups every other day. Last but not least, our amazing science teacher, Mr. Cassidy, who was the person that helped pull our project off. We really appreciate all the time and effort he volunteered in order to help coordinate our experiment, and answer all the many questions that we had.