Youth and Science

"Dialogue": about the world, about people
and about people in this world

The summer session of the School "Dialogue" was held from 23 July to 6 August and 74 participants studied in it.

This year, I went to "Dialogue" for the first time as an assistant. Before that, I had been coming here as a participant for several years and today, the summer school, so familiar to me, sparkled with new colors. It was a very useful, exciting and unforgettable experience that I want to share in this article.

The session was full of various events, some of which were held for the first time. For example, the welcome and introductory event called "Hole" was a joy. The event was unifying and in my opinion, quite interesting. Participants had to complete various tasks, from sports to intellectual ones and at the same time, answer easy questions that implied detailed answers with subsequent reasoning: "What can you look at forever?", "What is better - a melon or a watermelon?", "What would be the name of a TV series about your life?". Children and teachers learned about each other in an entertaining atmosphere.

Another memorable event was the "Economic Game". I would describe this event as a simulator of the market of goods and services: schoolchildren had to earn as much money as possible from scratch, without an initial package of resources, selling certain goods and services both to regular buyers that were teachers and through an auction. Each buyer had his or her own preferences and the participants had to focus on them when creating goods for sale.

For the first time, the "Dialogue" hosted the "Grey Morality" event - a meeting with the goal of encouraging children to discuss the ambiguous justice of life, to teach them to compromise even in the most controversial situations and to think about eternal issues. Many more interesting and diverse events were held, united by summer session participants' desire to develop their intellect, to broaden their horizons and to activate their ingenuity.

It is important to note that this year, there was a particularly rich project activity. The abundance and diversity of project topics this year was due to the expanded teaching staff compared to last year. During the summer session, children could choose between several projects in both the humanities and technological fields. For example, some of the School participants chose the project "Multilambia" - creating stop-motion animation, the humanities students developed their intellect in the SET project (memory capabilities) and strengthened their knowledge of foreign languages in the 99Pounds project. Many practical, scientific and technological projects were also presented. Fire monkeys carried out experiments with light and fire that was very interesting to watch from the sidelines, the project "Vacuum Gun" distracted participants in other projects with sudden shots, everyone was interested in whether they managed to launch a projectile into the air and at what distance. And the participants from "Electrical Engineering" often received offers to fix sockets and extension cords. The projects "Computer Vision" and "Kotaniki" pleased with their in-depth research work. They were engaged in writing codes in the Python programming language and biological estimation of the environment, respectively. In general, all the projects can boast of intensive research work that was presented to the session participants at the final scientific and practical conference. According to established tradition, the best research project was awarded a diploma named after Academician A.N.Sisakyan, the founder of the School "Dialogue".

You can talk a lot about each session of the "Dialogue" and still not tell everything that happened to you here during these two weeks. Each child returns home with new impressions, with a baggage of memories of bright moments and funny events that happened to him. And each teacher and assistant comes and begins to think about how to make the next school even more unforgettable and interesting. This school makes children and adults think about the world, about people and about people in this world.

In conclusion, on behalf of all the participants of "Dialogue" and Director of the School Sergey Shvidky, I would like to sincerely thank all those that help us to organize the sessions of "Dialogue" every year, especially Directorate of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Administration of the city of Dubna. We would like to express special gratitude to the administration of the base "Gubkinets" that has been welcoming us so warmly for many years now.

Olga STROGOVA