The Independent Center for Integrative Education presents:

The Natural Philosophy Workshop: Learning without Bounds

The workshop lead by Dr Valery Fradkov will take place during spring school brake and take 5 days starting on Sunday, March 28, 2010 and ending on Thursday, April 1. That will allow the working parents to be part of it and those who like to travel on Easter to be free by Friday. On Saturday, March 27 at 5pm Valery Fradkov invites parents for the free Family Orientation Meeting following with his presentation “Integrative Approach to Education”.  

The workshop will be offered in the format of 4 independent sessions a day aimed at different age groups. For the sake of reference, we will call the groups Kilobytes (Kb, for suggested age 6 to 10), Megabytes (Mb, 9 to 13), Gigabytes (Gb, 12 and up), and Colloquium (Coll, for everybody who is able to participate in discussion for about 90 min.)

For the older students (Mb and Gb), the workshop will be organized around a specific practical task that is complex enough to include many various steps that require analytical tools provided by different "subjects." We will discuss a travel to the Moon or a similar topic. On the first day, our focus will be on the physics and math related to the travel. The facilitator's experience as NASA scientist would help to address deep and not always obvious aspects. On the second day, we will move to the economy of the travel (facilitator's financial experience will be an asset). The theme of the third day will be the ecology of the travel (the facilitator has a long-standing interest in the subject). The fourth day will be focused on the team psychology (the facilitator is a clinical psychologist). The last day will be devoted to the questions and interests expressed by the students. At all times, references to literature, philosophy, and science fiction would naturally pop up as "food for thoughts." We will rely on such activities as facilitated discussions, role play, and Internet research among others.

For the younger students (Kb), the focus will be on the interactive play with imaginary situations that require analysis, decision making, and especially problem-solving skills. For example, we may plan an interplanetary travel, for which we will need a spaceship (and understand the basics of "rocket science"), space suites (and understand the basics of life support), team selection (with psychology of small groups) etc. Each day we will play a new game covering economical, ecological, cultural and scientific issues related to the topic of the game.

Note: It is important that all participants are familiar with the rules of conduct at the location of the workshop.