From November 15-20, students from NSU’s Specialized Educational Scientific Center (SESC) High School participated in the GEOFEST -2019 international festival for the first time. The event was held at the largest school in the world in Lucknow, India.
GEOFEST is an international competition-festival dedicated to geology and environmental issues. Its goal is to attract the attention of youth to environmental problems and to remind them that the Earth is our common home and we need to protect it together. The City Montessori School in Lucknow organizes GEOFEST. Teams from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Russia participated in the Olympiad. A team of SESC students represented Russia: Ksenia Antokhina (11-2), Vladislav Bobrov (11-6), Violetta Isakova (11-3), and Alena Tsanda (11-3). Anna Leonidovna Orlovskaya, Senior Lecturer at the SESC Department of Foreign Languages was the team leader.
The Olympiad consisted of several competitions: “Talk about the Earth”, a competition of individual presentations on current topics, an environmental poster contest, an ecology and science quiz, and a video competition about personal participation in environmental protection. SESC’s Ksenia Antokhina and Alena Tsanda won the silver medal and a prize for second place in the video competition.
Tsanda talked about the video competition,
Participants were required to edit a short video in two hours. In Akademgorodok, we shot material on the theme “Blue & Green or Yellow & Gray - The Choice is Ours” that was on the list proposed by the organizers. We interpreted its meaning to be that we choose the “color” of our planet. If people do not stop polluting nature and creating environmental problems, then the Earth will become "yellow and gray." However, it is never too late to stop and keep the planet “blue and green”. Our video showed an ordinary picnic on the Ob Sea. In the story, we go with a picnic basket and constantly have to make choices: throw away the bottle or think about a better solution, light a fire near the forest or in a safer place, leave garbage in the sand or clean it up and take it with us. We also touched on the issues of water pollution and plastic recycling. The four-minute video ended with the phrase “Choose blue & green with us”.
The festival also included competitions for creative arts such as dance and pantomime. These competitions were built around the themes of a harmonious existence between man and nature and the protection of humankind’s common home, planet Earth. Girls from SESC prepared a performance in bright national costumes for the ethnic dance competition. The SESC students’ trip to GEOFEST-2019 took place thanks to support from the Russian Federation Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
City Montessori School entered the Guinness Book of Records in 2013 as the largest school in the world with 55,000 students. In 2002, the school received the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education.
