Inter­na­tion­al spring camp in Losevo

The first inter­na­tion­al spring camp took place on the hol­i­days from 25^th to 31^st of March 2019 in the ter­rit­ory of already loved and proven by years recre­ation cen­ter «Parus» in Losevo (Len­in­grad region). 30 school stu­dents from Rus­sia, Iran and Ecuador took part in it. Few people know that some guys traveled to St. Peters­burg as long as 4 days, hav­ing exper­i­enced many dif­fi­culties, espe­cially in order to get to the camp «For­mula for Unity» for a week!

For 7 days, stu­dents were trained in three pro­files: Math­em­at­ics, Phys­ics, Lin­guist­ics. Inter­est­ingly, the people who were doing math­em­at­ics were only from Iran and Ecuador, and phys­ics and lin­guist­ics — only from Rus­sia. In addi­tion to the usu­al stud­ies in pro­files, every day they have already pre­pared their pro­jects (devel­op­ments) related to the sub­ject and the improve­ment of the world around us:

• Math­em­at­ics cre­ated two urb­an plan­ning pro­jects. This area is extremely rel­ev­ant in our time, when all new cit­ies are built, and the old ones grow in size. By choos­ing the loc­a­tion of the func­tion­al ele­ments of the city, the chil­dren did the ana­lyt­ic­al work, plan­ning the socio-eco­nom­ic and spa­tial devel­op­ment of the city. The res­ults are a report on work in the field of urb­an plan­ning, draw­ings that cor­res­pond to the developed concept, and a lay­out as a visu­al imple­ment­a­tion of the project.
• Phys­ics have cre­ated «nano­gloves based on non-New­to­ni­an flu­id.» In fact, they are not «nano», but it sounds more sci­entif­ic. The guys mixed the starch with water, put everything in a bal­loon and tied it up. Then this ball could be giv­en any shape, and due to the prop­er­ties of non-New­to­ni­an flu­id, it became sol­id upon impact. Scope: self-defense (comes with a text­book on phys­ics) and anti­stress (you can knead or beat the ball, which relieves stress).
  

• Lin­guist­ics pro­ject focused on provid­ing every­one with an oppor­tun­ity to learn Eng­lish in a way suit­able for them. For instance, for those who like listen­ing to music they came up with a set of playl­ists, where for each song there is a num­ber of use­ful words in it. Those who prefer read­ing can vis­it a new VK page and find a fic­tion book that would help them pre­pare for one of the inter­na­tion­al exams. People inter­ested in pre­par­a­tion for listen­ing exer­cises are wel­come to check out the You­Tube chan­nel with the vids that aim spe­cific­ally at expand­ing the view­ers’ vocab­u­lary. If one has but little time for study­ing but would gladly vis­it Ins­tagram they’ve got an account with beau­ti­ful pics, memes and inter­act­ive exer­cises (link was removed on March 22, 2022 at the request of Rus­si­an legis­la­tion).
  

«Uto­pia» was chosen as the theme of the camp — the whole week we tried to build a per­fect world, not for all of human­ity, but at least for all of us. First of all, after a com­mon get­ting know each oth­er and the ter­rit­ory, divi­sion into groups and inter­ac­tion in them, we all togeth­er planned the camp, namely, we answered the ques­tion «Which top­ics should be con­sidered in order to build an uto­pia?» By a gen­er­al vote we chosen «Life on the Earth. Eco­logy», «Peace and love», «Edu­ca­tion. Sci­ence. Pro­gress», «Cul­ture. Art. Tra­di­tions», which head­lined the next 4 days of the camp.

Life on the Earth. Ecology

The main task of the day was to unite for cre­at­ing a favor­able envir­on­ment­al situ­ation on Earth, more spe­cific­ally — in our future Uto­pia. This was facil­it­ated by Trust path, an Eco-quest on the street and the Open­ing cere­mony ded­ic­ated to the envir­on­ment and ecology.

Peace & Love

On the second day, the guys were engaged in build­ing, per­haps, the most import­ant com­pon­ent for cre­at­ing our Uto­pia — rela­tion­ships! Imme­di­ately after pro­files and pro­ject work, they had to find love in the game «Cupids», and then learn to appre­ci­ate the mean­ing of words through a role-play­ing game in which the king for­bade his lieges to talk in order to avoid con­flicts and quar­rels. The day ended with a beau­ti­ful even­ing of legends about love, peace, friend­ship and tolerance.

Edu­ca­tion. Sci­ence. Progress

Who would have thought that this top­ic could be so inter­est­ing, espe­cially if we con­sider it imme­di­ately after pro­files and pro­ject work?! Nev­er­the­less, the Quiz, Jeff and Debates, which filled up almost the whole after­noon, became one of the most mem­or­able events of the camp … giv­ing way only to the sports-intel­lec­tu­al game «Palka-Kopalka», which took place at the begin­ning of the same day.

Cul­ture. Tra­di­tions. Arts

The final them­at­ic day of the camp was at the same time the bright­est one (it’s not just about the events, but also about the weath­er, by the way)! Start­ing with the final classes in the pro­files and the final­iz­a­tion of the pro­jects, it con­tin­ued with cul­tur­al exchanges between par­ti­cipants from Rus­sia, Iran and Ecuador, pho­to­cross, dur­ing which each group not only took funny pic­tures, but also learned inter­est­ing facts about vari­ous cul­tur­al and art fig­ures from dif­fer­ent cen­tur­ies. The main event of the day was the even­ing ball, where the guys in a short time learned folk dances from dif­fer­ent coun­tries, and also cre­ated their own com­mon dance from four frag­ments (by the num­ber of the groups).

The ana­lys­is of the camp was col­lect­ive as well as its plan­ning. Accord­ing to its res­ults, it turned out that the exist­ence of Uto­pia is quite real, even if it was only for 60 people who lived one won­der­ful week togeth­er in Losevo.

It was neces­sary in order to learn the world around bet­ter and under­stand how to live in it all together

Amirkia Salimi (par­ti­cipant from Iran)