At the very beginning of this year, like many other people, I had no idea what I would do for my AP research project. I did the summer assignment on something that ended up being completely different from what I ended up doing, and completely shifted routes. At first, on the summer assignment, I was looking at how mines impact the area around them environmentally in Georgetown, Colorado, and an old mining town. But that just didn't seem interesting to me. As I thought about what my project should be, I thought about what I love to do. Play football, go to church, go skiing, spend time with friends, and the best one out of those options, to me, was skiing. I began thinking about things I could do my project on in skiing, maybe the ski bindings, helmets, boots, but eventually came up with the idea of ski goggles. I had just bought a new pair of goggles last year and remembered how last season it was so useful to finally have 2 different lenses, one for bright days and one for dark days. I thought about how much having these 2 lenses really affected my ability to ski, and wondered if they had a large effect. Trying to figure out a way to test how big an effect the ski goggles have on our skiing ability, I decided to test how they affect skier reaction time and depth perception. Depth perception eventually got thrown out as it was just seemingly very difficult to test. So that's how I got to my topic of testing how reaction time is affected by ski goggles. My research still needed a lot of development, however. I had no method to test this, and no underlying information about whether ski goggles even work. I found a lot of articles where people put ski goggles to the test. Some tested them while actually skiing, some tested how polarization affects visual perception, but one thing was common, they all tested how ski goggles affect visual perception, reaction; however, it was never tested. I found a lot of background information on ski goggles first, which included me learning what Visible light transmission was, and what different lens tints there were. I got most of this information from ski goggle manufacturers, and it gave me the baseline understanding I needed for ski goggles. The first source I found that showed me a possible methodology was an article where the braking time was compared between skiers and snowboarders. This was done by having a skier or snowboarder go down a slope and then stop as fast as they could when they saw a visual stimulus. This source, however, seemed hard to test and seemed as if it would have a lot of confounding variables. I then decided I needed to keep looking. Over winter break, I eventually found a source where people tested reaction time using a non-computer method, likely a ruler drop test. This course had nothing to do with skiing, but it got me thinking of ways to test reaction time without a computer. I eventually, through the internet, found the drop stick test, sticks were dropped by a device at random intervals, and people tried to catch as many as they could. I ended up picking this method after it was pointed out to me by my teachers that it would, for starters, be more fun, but also more measurable and have less of a risk of confounding variables than the ruler drop test. We need to care about this topic to raise awareness. I have too many stories of my family and friends getting hurt due to a lack of visual perception. A lot of times, a faster reaction time can be key in avoiding an injury on the mountain. My father broke his collarbone because he couldn't see an ice pack in time and swerved out of the way. My friend Cannon broke his collarbone because he couldn't see the unevenness in the snow until it was too late, a similar story with my cousin Owen, except he ruptured his spleen. My little brother broke his leg on a cat track, and although we are unsure how it happened, as he was young at the time, it was likely a misjudgment on his part. Overall, if we find that ski goggles have a large impact on reaction time, people might be more cognizant of the lens they wear while skiing, and make skiing a safer environment for everyone involved.