The city of Lucknow (India) hosted the 5th International Biotechnology Festival “Quest 2017”. The only representatives from Russia at the Festival were three students at the NSU Physics and Mathematics School (PhMS).
The Festival was held at the City Montessori School. In 2013, this school entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest school with 39,437 students. In addition, in 2002 the school received the UNESCO Prize for Education for Peace.
This is the third time the NSU PhMS has participated in the Festival. This year Tatyana Goreva, Anastasia Zhiburt and Ekaterina Ivanova, tenth-graders from Novosibirsk, were the only Russian representatives. Overall, more than 30 teams from India, Nepal, Jordan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh joined the Festival in Lucknow.
The schoolchildren participated in debates about artificial intelligence, wrote creative essays about problems facing mankind and defended their opinions in spontaneous speeches on a given topic. All Festival activities were conducted in English.
"This is a very important factor", noted Anna Orlovskaya, the PhMS English teacher who accompanied the team. "We had to find people who could understand the subject well and knew English very well for this trip to India" she continued.
Tatyana Goreva won second place for her confident debate performance. The debate was based on the statement “Artificial intelligence has taken over our lives” and the debaters had to present their case "for" or "against" the statement. The position of each participant was determined by drawing lots two days before the debate. Tatiana Goreva was given an opposing argument to defend but, in reality Tatyana said she does not have a position on the issue. "I presented a warning about the possible negative consequences of the development of artificial intelligence and about what needs to be done to avoid them," she said.
The Novosibirsk team won the prize, "The Most Versatile Team", since even though there were only three of them, they took part in all events in the older group category.
