Mensa Grammar School: achievements and events (2017)

The most significant events included the annual Open Days, visited by over 80 children and their parents. The visitors were welcomed by our students, who prepared some simple physics experiments and demonstrations.

We also co-hosted the conference of the Society for Talent and Gifts “Quo Vadis, education of the gifted?”, which was aimed predominantly at teachers, psychologists, and teachers of talented children.

For pupils of primary schools from Prague 5, 6, 13, and 17, our school organized a contest, called “Primary School Talent”, that tested children’s general knowledge, as well as their knowledge about their neighbourhoods.

Over the last 7 years, our school has managed to acquire over 12 mil. CZK from European funds, through several projects:

• the Kaleidoskop project will incorporate multicultural topics into lessons of some subjects, as well as into project days. It will also lead towards broadening the range of methods and teaching formats and the school will be awarded with a World School title by the Varianty society. The project also allowed us to acquire our own film studio and tablet-equipped language classroom.
• Within the framework of the Edison project, 7 foreign students will come for study fellowships at our school.
• Since September 2016, our school has become a part of the D of E programme (Duke of Edinburgh Award), a worldwide programme of informal education for young people aged 14 to 24. Our students set their goals in the areas of skills, sports activities, volunteering, and expeditions and, with the help of our teachers, they strive to achieve them.
• In March 2017, based on the initiative of our seventh year student Josef Kučera, the first year of the Mensa forum started. Students had the opportunity to listen to a lecture on spintronics by Tomáš Jungwirth, a professor at the University of Nottingham, and the leading researcher at the Department of Spintronics and Nanoelectronics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Other interesting discussions and lectures followed, i.e., with the cardiac surgeon Jan Pirk, politician Cyril Svoboda, comedian Lukáš Pavlásek, literary critic, philologist, and theologist Martin C. Putna, Cardinal and Archbishop Dominik Duka, psychiatrist Cyril Höschl, meteorologist Michal Žák, neurologist Petr Zach, lawyer-songwriter Ivo Jahelka, sexologist Radim Uzel, biochemist and former Chairman of the Czech Academy of Sciences Václav Pačes).
• For the sixth and seventh years, we organized discussions within the framework of the project Bankers to Schools. Students had the opportunity to discuss safe on-line environment, to find out how to recognize a cyber-attack and how the online security of banks works.

Besides the events mentioned above, there are ongoing activities, such as skiing courses, discussion and chess clubs, school magazine publishing, project days, various excursions, discussions, and lectures, students’ participation in various “olympiads”, Secondary School Expert Activities contests, and the Young Custodian project, participation and organization of various conferences, etc. There is also the ongoing Nautilus project aimed at developing students’ learning skills. Besides, for the first time this year, Science was introduced as a subject combining the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics, while also reaching out into other fields through tandem teaching.

Achievements of our students

In the last school year, our students have recorded multiple achievements in knowledge-based competitions and Olympiads, as well as in sports and other fields. Besides the most notable ones, detailed below, students also participated in the Logical Olympiad, Talnet, Stretech, CTY Programme, Secondary School Expert Activities contest, Ecological Olympiad, Children’s Scientific Conference, ABAKU League, Debating League, Chemquest, and many other events.

• A 7th year student, Josef Kučera, participated in the regional round of the contest EXPO SCIENCE AMAVET, with his work titled Nanoprobe and progressed to the national finals.
• Three of our students joined an economics project at Cerge EI, Institute of Applied Economics, and thus had an opportunity to gain practical experience of research activities in that field.
• 6th year students (Dan Žuravljov and Martin Edl) participated in a Bastl-Battle competition for young DIY-guys interested in electronics. Their task was to build a functional machine of their own choice using the Arduino electronics platform. They won easily, and were awarded with numerous prizes.
• In the Debating League tournament, our school was represented in the last school year by two teams, debating in both the English and Czech parts of the competition, and one of them won by a great margin.
• During the children’s drama/art festival Vylomeniny, our students were offered an opportunity to present their own work at this year’s topic – Circus.
• Radek Olšák ranked 7th in the National Finals of the Mathematical Olympiad, and won, among other things, participation at an international summer camp.
• The Mensa Grammar School team won the Prague School Chess Contest.

We believe that this year will be as successful for our students as the last one and that we will be able to regularly report the individual achievements on our website.

Related topics

• Mensa Grammar School

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