Inter­na­tion­al Camp in Aca­dem­ic Gymnasium

The third inter­na­tion­al mul­tidiscip­lin­ary camp «For­mula of Unity», organ­ized by the Euler Found­a­tion togeth­er with St. Peters­burg State Uni­ver­sity, was divided into two schools: a Rus­si­an one and an inter­na­tion­al session.

The inter­na­tion­al school was from July 17 to July 31, and 79 school­chil­dren par­ti­cip­ated in it, including:

• 49 from Russia,
• 8 from Romania,
• 6 from Spain,
• 5 from France
• And 11 from Ecuador.

57  par­ti­cipants were engaged in four Math­em­at­ics clubs, 11 chil­dren took part in a Com­puter sci­ence group and 11 stu­dents — in a human­it­ari­an club.

Young Rus­si­an math­em­aticians in the camp were mainly suc­cess­ful par­ti­cipants of the on-line Maths club «For­mula of Unity» at the St. Peters­burg State Uni­ver­sity, and also suc­cess­ful par­ti­cipants in the pre­vi­ous sim­il­ar camps. When we invited school­chil­dren to the club and the camp, the pri­or­ity was giv­en to chil­dren from small towns and rur­al areas who have few­er oppor­tun­it­ies to obtain addi­tion­al math­em­at­ic­al education.

A total of 72 aca­dem­ic hours of classes were giv­en (6 in each of 12 days). One day was a day off with an excur­sion to St. Petersburg.

The main part of the math­em­at­ic­al stud­ies was in the form of tra­di­tion­al group les­sons where chil­dren solved Olympi­ad prob­lems. Moreover, a num­ber of pop­u­lar lec­tures on vari­ous top­ics were read, includ­ing lec­tures by S.V. Vos­tokov (St. Peters­burg), A. Campillo (Val­lad­ol­id), V. Fock (Stras­bourg), D.V. Zuev (Saint-Peters­burg) and R. Mol­lano (Seville).

The life in the camp was organ­ized on the basis of the meth­od of col­lect­ive cre­at­ive edu­ca­tion by Ivan Ivan­ov. The work based on this tech­nique (also called the ped­agogy of com­mon con­cern) was organ­ized by coun­selors from the ped­ago­gic­al group «Change» at the Len­in­grad State Uni­ver­sity named after A.S. Pushkin. All par­ti­cipants were divided into groups from 12 to 16 people where chil­dren of dif­fer­ent ages and nation­al­it­ies worked togeth­er. Every day the groups par­ti­cip­ated in col­lect­ive cre­at­ive tasks, which in most cases had been developed by the par­ti­cipants them­selves dur­ing Coun­cil meet­ings. The groups ana­lyzed their work, selec­ted new duty com­mand­ers and inter­changed their tra­di­tion­al cre­at­ive tasks dur­ing even­ing «lights».