Revital 09

There are four partners who have participated in the activity Talnet International since 2007:

Talnet - The main coordinator

„Talnet – online to science“ (www.talnet.cz), an educational project, offers online and face to face educational activities with topics from science and mathematics for gifted youth (13-19 years) from the whole Czech Republic.

It is organised by Faculty of Math and Physics of Charles University in Prague since 2003, later in cooperation with other faculties, universities and science and research institutes in the Czech Republic.
Talnet offers the whole structure of educational and exploring activities. They differ in topic, forms (face to face, blended, online) teaching approach, work load, complexity and applicability. We prefer active participation of children in rich learning environment rather than results of psycho-diagnostics tests.

Since the beginning of the project we have confirmed that many gifted children like more and more challenging, e.g. demanding and complex, activities. It may be implemented and perceived in many different aspects such as subject, problem solving, creativity, production and social aspects etc. From the point of socio-cultural diversity we are not able to satisfy these needs only within the Czech Republic. This was a strong motivation to develop an international activity called Talnet International. The main purpose was to give to gifted children further opportunities to develop their competencies and to extend the offer of authentic educational and social activities for them. Especially, occasions to work in multi-national teams and communicate in foreign language appeared to be an appropriate instrument from the point of increasing demandingness.

Estrella from Spain

Grupo Estrella is the oldest group of the Programa Estrella for gifted children. The Programa Estrella is part of the Spanish Society for the Study of Giftedness of the Complutense University of Madrid, member of the European Council of High Abilities. The participants are gifted teenagers from 14 to 17 years old. The aim of our group is the harmonic development of our members; and to have a space where teenagers can share with others with similar interests and abilities. We work on scientific projects as well as discussions related to issues of the real world. The communication in the group is mainly online and once a month we get together to share the advances of our projects and to have a debate.

Kubus from Germany

The Kubus is an unusual community of gifted pupils and students, who are discussing about everything secundarily over the internet, but preferably in real life.
The idea of Kubus developed during a meeting of the DGhK (a German group for gifted children and their parents) in 1998. Five joung people, who got to know each other at different workshops from the DGhK and TMSZ (Technomathematisches Schülerzentrum / Centre for young mathematical talents), founded an unoffcial group, they called Kubus. They designed a first website with a webchat and a mailing list. They planned meetings and a yearly trip in a big European city.

Today, some changed. More and more people joined the small group. We got a forum with about 100 active members today. Now we have cooperated twice with TALNET. But we still have our traditions: Meetings, mostly in Northrhine-Westphalia, where we do different activities like visting a museum, playing games a whole afternoon or just walking through a city and discussing. We still do yearly trips to a city, this year we go to Wolfsburg for a workshop-week.

All in all we are an unoffical organisation - everybody can join us if he / she feels good with us.

Mlady prirodovedci from Slovakia