Intensive educational courses of the Pacific Project School started at the Primorsky Aquarium during spring school holidays. The courses are addressed to 8-11-year students and cover several subject areas: Humanities, Engineering, IT, Biotechnologies, Biomedicine, and World Ocean.
The World Ocean studies are run by the Institute of the World Ocean of the Far-Eastern Federal University (FEFU) and include four courses. Two of the courses are being implemented now in partnership with the Primorsky Aquarium.
“Ornithology and Me” (developed by Olga Demina and Ilia Kuzora) teaches about penguin husbandry at the Primorsky Aquarium and about the job of a bird keeper. Young explorers spend a lot of time in the aviary, observing penguins, feeding and weighing them.
During the “Congratulations, it’s a boy!” course (developed by Miroslava Sabutskaia, Vladislava Kreshchenovskaia and Kseniia Liubimkina), participants identify sex in Humboldt penguins by PCR-based techniques. In this course, teenagers are also offered the opportunity to interact with the birds, which brings them tons of joy. As Miroslava Sabutskaia, Lead Specialist of the Ornithology Department, said, the topic she suggested for the Pacific Project School generated considerable excitement among the students, and scores of them wanted to participate.
Each course is two weeks long. It includes lectures and hands-on lessons in the classrooms and laboratories of the Primorsky Aquarium. Teenagers hone their skills in doing scientific research, from conducting experiments to writing scientific papers.
Besides the educational courses, the Aquarium has prepared an extracurricular program for the participants. It includes sports activities, creative workshops and tours.
Many students of the School have already taken part in the project before and are planning to enroll for it in the future.
The Pacific Project School is a FEFU project which has been carried out since 2015. The School has several goals: to teach school students about the Russian Far East; to encourage them to study the humanities, technical and natural sciences; and to develop a talent pool for the Far East of Russia.