Summer Science School by SAS Students

The inspiring story of one educational initiative.

SAS students' extracurricular activities are naturally integrated into the learning process — class formats and course summative activities, teaching in additional educational programs and Excellence Track, working in the Academic Writing Center, organizing exhibitions, and more. SAS students strive to reach their potential in a variety of areas beyond academic achievement. They learn to push the boundaries of their knowledge and create unique projects.

Fr om August 7-12, SAS hosted the Sigma Summer Science School for 7th-11th graders, which was organized by our students and their friends from NSU, OmSU and the joint undergraduate program of SKOLKOVO and MIPT.

The students thought of everything — from topics and class schedules to the game points system — and created a unique educational space wh ere the generational proximity of students and pupils formed a comfortable learning environment. Students learned to make educational decisions on their own, and the organizers gained valuable experience in creating a large-scale event — also on their own.

We offer you to read an article by Nadezhda Valeeva, a 2nd year SAS student and co-organizer of “Sigma” in Tyumen, in which she tells about the history of the project's creation, its philosophy, principles and, of course, about the people thanks to whom it was able to become a reality.

“Sigma.Tyumen” is a free summer science school for 7th-11th graders organized by students fr om the School of Advanced Studies (SAS), NSU, OmSU, MIPT and SKOLKOVO from August 7-12 at SAS. The text is about how Sigma came into being, reached Tyumen and blossomed in a new place.

The main feature of Sigma is that it was created entirely by students. From 2015 to 2022, Sigma existed as an exclusively Omsk student initiative, organized by Omsk students for Omsk students. Among current SAS students there are former graduates of this project — Yulia Gurtovenko and Nastya Volobueva.

Nastya Volobueva is an ambassador of all things in Omsk, and it was largely thanks to her that Sigma came to Tyumen. The whole structure of Sigma in Tyumen was based on her initiative and madness. Under her management, the school's organization acquired a clear horizontal. For the students, Sigma became an exercise in autonomy: decisions were made collectively, and tasks were distributed without hierarchies or instructions, according to the level of responsibility that everyone was willing to accept.

The Sigma lesson on student self-organization was accurately described by Sofya Matveeva: “A house does not start with bricks. It starts with finding people who are ready to do the work — the work they will be given and the work they are ready to do themselves. “Sigma was built on horizontality, namely, on accepting some level of responsibility for each brick laid. Everyone understood that the process had to keep working, which meant that there had to be hands ready to take on the job (which was not always clear, clear and understandable).” Indeed, new challenges had to be faced — everything vague, unclear, and incomprehensible without mentors and elders - until an exhilarating moment when all the organizational processes came together, students came into the SAS building ready to study, and dispersed to our classes. The beginning of the shift, however, added to the number of unforeseen problems, but resilience to unpredictability and the stress that follows from it is one of the skills that emerges organically in the SAS educational environment. Perhaps our courage also helped, because after studying at SAS during holidays, you inertially grab everything new without fear.

All classes at Sigma were also taught by students. In Tyumen, they were students from SAS, NSU, OmSU, the joint bachelor's program of MIPT and SKOLKOVO, and for many it was their first teaching experience. The most common motivation for teaching at Sigma is that students just love something enough to want to share it. There is a clear affinity between high school and college students: we were recently high school students ourselves, and this affinity creates a safe environment in which it is easier to awaken a student's keen interest in a subject.

The courses at Sigma are interdisciplinary — this is a feature of Sigma in Tyumen, a result of SAS interdisciplinary education. It was unintentional, but very successful, because it became our competitive advantage. In addition, we gave students maximum freedom in choosing their classes: there was no strict mediation in the program, and students chose the courses themselves. This was the beginning of the principle that Nastya called “carrot without stick” (and wh ere did we get the stick from...), i.e. to avoid any form of coercion as much as possible and to create an environment in which students strive to learn on their own.

Such a “carrot” was the gamification system created by the organizers of the Omsk “Sigma”. It brought the spirit of competition and game aspiration to “complete all the achieves”. For attending curricular and extracurricular activities, students received game points that could be exchanged for prizes. The system worked effectively, and students reached the end, and the number of points did not depend on the age of the pupil, everyone was equally involved in the learning process.

With Sigma, we students definitely became braver and more confident in our abilities. Now “Sigma” is over, but the skills of cooperation, self-organization, communication and all such complex skills that cannot be described by a simple “-tions” remain. It was a school also for the students themselves. Now we know for sure that we can independently gather a bunch of kids in one place and get them interested in a bunch of new things - and that's just the beginning! Now with the team we are expanding - the next location of Sigma will be Tobolsk.

Special thanks to SAS students and alumni for setting Sigma in motion: Vanya Kashcheev, Sonya Matveeva and Alisa Bekmanova - for the work of the Sigma training office; Milana Faizulina and Dana Platitsyn - for extracurricular activities; Polina Eliseeva and Sasha Kamyshenko - for solving administrative issues; Sasha Lee, Tolya Stepanov and Polina Shish - for the design of Sigma; Yulia Gurtovenko for our website; Nadia Valeeva for Sigma's social media and texts (if you don't praise yourself, no one will); Alsu Battalova, Katya Elsufieva and Nastya Mikhailyuk for heroic public relations; and Margarita Pozolotina for finding partners.

Thank you to our students and alumni for the Sigma curriculum: Vitala Rasskazov - for a course on ethics; Sonya Matveeva - for a course on cyborgs; Roma Islamov - for a course on child emancipation; Alisa Bekmanova - for a course on economics; Yula Gurtovenko and Artyom Sidenko - for a course on quantum mechanics; Polina Shish and Sasha Lee - for a course on existentialism and games; Milana Faizulina, for a course on education; Melanika Weinstein, for a course on the philosophy of the body; Ilya Sklyuev, for a course on humanities education; Mariam Oveyan, for a course on logical errors; Sonya Brudkova, for a course on poetry; and Polina Eliseeva, for a course on criminology. Individual classes at Sigma were taught by Kolya Kravchenko, Yaroslav Kochkin and Leonid Kharlov - and we thank them too.

We could not have done it without the help of the SAS administration, for which we would like to say thank you to Lyudmila Malygina, Anna Mutt, Anna Medyukova-Meyer, Yulia Nasyrova, and Andrey Scherbenok.

And also a special thank you — the very, very big thank you — to the students of all the other universities who helped us at Sigma Tyumen and created all those Sigma resources in Omsk on which we based our shift.