<p>I recently talked to a teacher at my school about doing an independent study computer science research project w/ him. He said that would be cool. Except I don't exactly know what computer science research is. Is it just creating a new program? Or something more? Any examples or ideas? I'm a soph who knows pascal and is learning c++</p>
<p>if you don't come up with anything, consider learning about algorithms by doing the computing olympiad instead. Free training material, free internet contests, and a chance at a free summer training program. <a href="http://www.usaco.org%5B/url%5D">www.usaco.org</a></p>
<p>So is computer science research just creating new algorithims to do different things?</p>
<p>computer research can be a lot of different things - software, hardware, robotics, artificial intelligence, speech recognition. If you don't already know enough about computer science to have an idea of what you would like to do, you might want to take on something narrower than "computer science research". That's why I suggested usaco. It will give you a structured format to gain more experience, which will make it easier to come up with ideas of projects you might like to work on.</p>
<p>if you are learning some programming languages right now,
might I suggest looking into the area of programming languages? Its an incredibly cool area that I myself first became interested because I was disatsified with languages I was initially taught. (I name a bunch of resources that have nice research papers available in a post on the the RSI thread)</p>
<p>For a good place to start getting some basic computer science info, I suggest looking at the free online version of "the structure and interpretation of computer programs", merely a google away.</p>