Inter­na­tion­al Camp 2027

Details of the organ­iz­a­tion of the camp

Where: A recre­ation cen­ter in the Len­in­grad Region, loc­ated on the banks of a river – a pic­tur­esque and cozy spot.

How: Accom­mod­a­tion in double rooms with all amen­it­ies, six meals a day (break­fast, lunch, din­ner, and addi­tion­al meals).

A doc­tor is on duty 24 hours a day. Chil­dren are always under the super­vi­sion of adults (coun­selors and teach­ers). 24-hour secur­ity is provided by the recre­ation center­’s intern­al department.

Trans­fer: Tra­di­tion­ally, we per­son­ally meet (and see off at the end of the shift) each par­ti­cipant and group with an escort at the bus and train sta­tions and at the St. Peters­burg air­port, and then organ­ize the par­ti­cipants’ trans­port­a­tion to the shift’s base by bus.

Socio, 8–11 grade

On the Soci­o­tech­ni­cian pro­file we will try to under­stand what soci­ety is and how an ordin­ary per­son can influ­ence it.

The big world around us is full with chal­lenges. Most cer­tainly there are issues that dis­turb you per­son­ally but you feel like there is noth­ing you can do about that. Many people think that all that remains for us is to accept it and leave it alone. But there are those who decide to change the world around them. It can be a small “world”: a group of friends, a circle of like-minded people. Or there can be com­munit­ies and even entire move­ments to imple­ment wide­scale changes.

That is the core of soci­o­tech­nics: by unit­ing, people can change the envir­on­ment around them. Spe­cial tech­no­lo­gies have been developed for this — social tech­no­lo­gies. They provide answers to the questions:

• How to gath­er like-minded people?
• How to resolve conflicts?
• Why do some ideas spread every­where, while oth­ers disappear?
• How to cre­ate new ways of living?
• How to take into account glob­al civil­iz­a­tion trends in our every­day life?
• How to raise resources for a non-profit project?

…And much more. Dur­ing the camp, we will get acquain­ted with these tools and under­stand how to apply them to real life situations.

But you won’t be able to rebuild the envir­on­ment if you don’t learn to change your­self! There­fore, a sig­ni­fic­ant part of the course will be ded­ic­ated to learn­ing tools for self-devel­op­ment, self-determ­in­a­tion, and self-management.

Of course there will be a lot of dis­cus­sions. We will dis­cuss what is hap­pen­ing in the world, con­sider exist­ing trends and social prob­lems. When we start talk­ing about the trans­form­a­tion of social real­ity, dif­fer­ent people will have dif­fer­ent pos­i­tions on what this “change for the bet­ter” means. So we shall also dis­cuss our ideas for bet­ter soci­ety and what the very concept of “bet­ter” means.

Teach­er: Alexey Doil­nit­syn (Io). Philo­soph­er and prac­ti­tion­er in devel­op­ing edu­ca­tion­al communities.

Crit­ic­al Think­ing, 8–11 grade

“The import­ant thing is not to stop ques­tion­ing. Curi­os­ity has its own reas­on for exist­ing.”
Albert Einstein.

Our brain is the world’s data-pro­cessing centre — the only tool that lets us under­stand not just ourselves, but also how the world around us works. You’d think such a com­plex organ should func­tion flaw­lessly. But it does​n’t: the brain makes plenty of logic­al (and not so logic­al) mis­takes, rooted in the very nature of our thinking.

On top of that, dif­fer­ent people per­ceive the world dif­fer­ently — and all because there’s some­times too much inform­a­tion around, and some­times too little.

So how do we look at the world object­ively, not sub­ject­ively? Why do we tend to make mis­takes even when we’re sure we’re right? How can you tell if your opin­ion is being manipulated?

In this mod­ule, we’ll explore how our think­ing works, study the main mis­takes in how we per­ceive inform­a­tion, and learn the laws of logic. We’ll also talk about manip­u­la­tion in argu­ment­a­tion and how to handle your­self skil­fully in a debate with an opponent.

Teach­er: Ana­stas­ia Plot­nikova (Thais) — game-based edu­cat­or, stu­dent at the Nation­al Social and Ped­ago­gic­al Col­lege (АНПОО НСПК), major­ing in Ele­ment­ary School Teach­ing; com­pleted the course “Crit­ic­al Think­ing in Edu­ca­tion­al Activ­it­ies” from the Asso­ci­ation of Rus­si­an Train­ers (ART); Yan­dex Crowd employee.

Maths

The math­em­at­ics course in this round of our camp will be based around two com­pon­ents. One is expand­ing on famil­i­ar school-related top­ics such that the stu­dents will be able to live through the pro­cess of encoun­ter­ing a new prob­lem, learn­ing the con­cepts behind it, offer­ing their own ideas and finally tack­ling the prob­lem as well as pro­pos­ing oth­er solu­tions and gen­er­al­isa­tions. For an aspir­ing math­em­atician, this pro­cess is in itself self-reward­ing, for stu­dents spe­cial­ising in oth­er areas but look­ing to focus on maths at our camp, this will be a great exper­i­ence of look­ing at ideas taught in school from a new angle, as well as explor­ing your own cre­ativ­ity and poten­tial. The oth­er com­pon­ent will involve a more enter­tain­ing and inform­al sec­tion of prob­lems built around logic and lat­er­al thinking.

Goals:

• To revis­it some school-taught con­cepts and see how stu­dents from dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds have slightly dif­fer­ent inter­pret­a­tions of the same ideas
• To learn to solve prob­lems and under­stand cent­ral facts in top­ics lis­ted below
• To grow in soft skills dur­ing class dis­cus­sions and prob­lem solving
• Find a favour­ite maths prob­lem that will keep you want­ing to handle it even after class is finished

Pro­posed top­ics (may be modified):

1. Num­bers: types of num­bers and arith­met­ic oper­a­tions, dif­fer­ent nota­tions and meth­ods in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Prop­er­ties of integers. The idea of a math­em­at­ic­al proof. Prov­ing some men­tal arith­met­ic tricks and prop­er­ties. Prime num­bers, divis­ib­il­ity. Using algebra to solve prob­lems about integers. Intro­duc­tion to dif­fer­ent bases and their uses in IT. More proofs and “open-type” ques­tions in Maths.
2. Algebra: For­mu­lae, algeb­ra­ic expres­sions and their mean­ing. Poly­no­mi­als. Equa­tions and quad­rat­ic equa­tions. Deriv­ing related the­or­ems and for­mu­lae. Graph­ing quad­rat­ic func­tions. Geo­met­ric and phys­ic­al proofs of quad­rat­ic func­tions: con­nect­ing algebra and geometry.
3. Geo­metry: Ideas of area and volume, an intu­it­ive approach to how they can be cal­cu­lated or one for­mula can be derived from one anoth­er. “Mass meth­od” as a means of look­ing at geo­met­ric shapes as phys­ic­al objects. Dif­fer­ent coun­tries place dif­fer­ent emphases on geo­metry and this will be discussed.
4. Logic and algorithms. Cooper­at­ive win­ning strategies in logic­al prob­lems, where the solu­tion relies on the decision of many people who share a com­mon goal (such as pir­ates split­ting a treas­ure on cer­tain con­di­tions, each with their own per­son­al interest). Logic prob­lems as math­em­at­ic­al prob­lems which require under­stand­ing of con­text and tri­al-and-error, rather than expli­cit know­ledge. Some situ­ations men­tioned in prob­lems are to be acted out by the stu­dents themselves : )

The course will end with an inform­al but ‘prop­er’ exam/​quiz which will require being able to put for­ward and apply from scratch a hand­ful of the prob­lems dis­cussed dur­ing the two weeks.

Teach­er: Fil­ipp Grinev (Moscow), teach­er at ‘Two Times Two Labor­at­ory,’ edu­ca­tion con­sult­ant and event organ­iser with interests in math­em­at­ic­al mod­el­ling in sports sci­ence. (Edu­ca­tion: Moscow First Med­ic­al State Uni­ver­sity [Sechen­ov Uni­ver­sity], Mech­an­ics and math­em­at­ic­al mod­el­ing [in medi­cine], ~BSc)

Psy­cho­logy, 5–11 grade

The human brain is very com­plex, and we still don’t know a lot about it. You’ll be able to try being a psy­cho­lo­gist, a cli­ent and you’ll even be able to under­stand what your pet thinks and why Napo­leon decided to con­quer the world. Our course has some the­ory, but, most import­antly, it is full of prac­tice. You can learn to read body lan­guage, to deal with dif­fi­cult situ­ations, to under­stand your­self and oth­ers bet­ter. There is even some time to ana­lyze music, paint­ings and movies from the psy­cho­lo­gic­al standpoint.

Dur­ing the classes we will cov­er the main top­ics that will help us under­stand it better:

- You will learn about dif­fer­ent psy­cho­lo­gic­al approaches, how phy­co­logy has developed in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. We’ll com­pare our every­day psy­cho­lo­gic­al exper­i­ence with our for­eign colleagues.

- We’ll ana­lyse the way the human psyche works from the bio­lo­gic­al point of view too. A part of our les­sons will be ded­ic­ated to neuroscience.

- Learn­ing about clin­ic­al psy­cho­logy and psy­chi­atry, we will study the mech­an­isms of form­a­tion of patho­lo­gies, vari­ous neur­o­lo­gic­al dis­eases, and try to dia­gnose patients. Some of the psy­cho­lo­gic­al tech­niques that we will study can help us bet­ter under­stand not only oth­ers, but also ourselves. Emo­tions, feel­ings, rela­tion­ships, conflicts.

The classes will have the­or­et­ic­al sec­tions, but the most import­ant is the prac­tic­al part. There will be dif­fer­ent les­son formats, includ­ing a secret group pro­ject in col­lab­or­a­tion with our musicians.

There are no age lim­its for people who want to sign up for my classes :) If you took a psy­cho­logy course in school and plan to par­ti­cip­ate here, you will learn a lot of new inform­a­tion too, because mostly I will use uni­ver­sity level mater­i­als. And my courses don’t repeat them­selves so if you have already been at my classes you’ll still learn a lot of new stuff.

I will be very glad to see you there!

Teach­er: Andrade Samar­ina Karo­lina, Bach­el­or, Insti­tute of Spe­cial Edu­ca­tion and Rehab­il­it­a­tion of the Herzen State Ped­ago­gic­al University.