Science and Education Centre Višnjan’s mission is promotion and encouragement of innovation and excellence in the scientific, technological and artistic work with children and youth through obtaining support to gifted youth and their educators in fields of natural and social sciences, technologies, environment protection, arts and culture.
Our vision – constituting one of the top 10 world’s centres for education of the gifted children and youth, which will create, conduct and evaluate highest quality, innovative and interdisciplinary programmes aimed to children and youth, their parents and educators, has been conceived back in 1988, by organising a first Višnjan School of Astronomy.
Up to date, Višnjan educational programmes have been spread to almost all scientific areas, with activities aimed towards different age and interest groups (through pre-schoolers and beyond), from popular science to highly specialised, cutting-edge, themes and projects. Primary goals of scientific education and science popularisation are also obtained through teacher training with goal of improving their competences in teaching and work with academically gifted students.
Our programmes’ specificities are:
- individual work with every participant through mentoring and project work
- direct inclusion in cutting edge research work as team member or team leader
- relaxed atmosphere during work aimed to jointly scope and challenge yields exceptional educational experience, and usually valuable scientific results
- encouragement of student’s creativity and critical thinking
- interdisciplinary projects
- scientific communication and presentation of work
Through long-time operation Višnjan programs had hosted a lots of students, of whom are many today’s well established scientists and researchers, active in prestigious world institutions.