Academy of Talents

Kamenny Island Palace is a historical and cultural heritage site, protected by UNESCO.

The Academy of Talents was designed to provide an educational platform unlike any other educational institution, for the children and youth of Saint Petersburg.
The year 2015 set the beginning of a new period for the Kamenny Island Palace – the Academy of Talents opened its doors, connecting legends and historical facts, traditions and modern approach.
Academy of Talents
Kamenny Island Palace is a historical and cultural heritage site, protected by UNESCO.

The Academy of Talents was designed to provide an educational platform unlike any other educational institution, for the children and youth of Saint Petersburg.
The year 2015 set the beginning of a new period for the Kamenny Island Palace – the Academy of Talents opened its doors, connecting legends and historical facts, traditions and modern approach.

Project goals

Create a platform for free self-actualization of creative youth, which will help to identify talents and aid in choosing future profession.
Organically integrate modern technologies into classic palace interior preserving the architecture of the building.

Project description

To ensure development of a variety of talents of the Academy's attendees the palace space was divided into five creative and scientific exploratory zones.

Center for engaging science (STEM center)

The Center utilizes the "Educating with passion" principle to carry out combined development programs. The Center is equipped with unique laboratory sets and installations for physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and ecology, which allows children to conduct comprehensive research and make their own discoveries.

The STEM center is symbolically separated into subject topic halls. Each area is equipped with PASCO lab sets to conduct experiments in physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and ecology. Studying a layout of bridges and how a gyroscope works, finding the power of impulse by using a special platform, or, for example, recreating the conditions for cloud formation – all these activities are available to each child, who can not only imprint the theory from the school program into their mind but also model a natural phenomenon or a process as well as understand how objects and phenomena work.

Young visitors can conduct scientific experiments with the help of PASCO lab tools.

There are nine interactive tables that are fit for conducting lab research.

Polymedia has developed and implemented scenarios for demonstrating and conducting experiments with the help of PASCO laboratory equipment. The key challenge of the task was to go beyond the boundaries of the school program and prepare memorable and engaging experiments that cover the subjects of the natural science series while preserving the educational component. In collaboration with teacher practitioners, Polymedia methodists have developed 32 unique scenarios for demonstrating and conducting experiments for each PASCO installation. Children can conduct their experiment, explore the findings of scientists, make their own conclusions, and learn interesting facts about the phenomenon. Each experiment is followed by a quiz that helps to imprint the acquired knowledge.

The concert and theatre center

Kamenny Island Palace is also a site for concerts, recitals, and theatre plays. The equipment of the Center includes:
  • Bose portable PA systems;
  • a mixer to connect sound sources;
  • a set of wireless microphones and lighting equipment from Robe.

Center for intelligent games

At the Center, schoolchildren develop mnemonics and techniques for creative thinking by playing the roles of experts of famous television game shows and by participating in intellectual adventures and cognitive-training city championships.

For that purpose, the Center is equipped with a comprehensive interactive solution that includes various means of visualization.

The interactive table features software with several games: "Smartheads", "What? Where? When?", "Brain Ring", "Jeopardy!"

Depending on the game, an LCD panel, which serves as the screen for the participants and audience, displays scores and questions for the game. The software supports updates for the questions database. For each game, the questions can be picked randomly, taking into account the age of the participants and the topic of the game.

Project design center

The Center for Project Activities (or a project design center) was created for costume parties, festivities, time travel, scientific immersion, and role-playing games.

The information display system, conference system, and videoconferencing set-up help transform the Center into a contemporary area for meetings and active discussions between schoolchildren and scientists, actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians. Students can study in several sections of the Center for Project Activities: in the conference hall and coworking space.

The coworking space has been created especially for creative collaborative activities. A large interactive video wall that consists of four LCD panels can display images, videos, and PDF documents; add visual comments; and save notes. The video wall serves as a shared workspace that assists in discussing creative projects.

The coworking space is also equipped with a smart Flipbox display. The conference hall is equipped with an LCD panel that supports image input from laptops, wireless voice amplification conference system to increase the overall volume of discussions, and Lifesize videoconferencing system, which is capable of connecting participants with famous people not only from Saint Petersburg but from any city of Russia.

The Academy includes an educational multimedia class that is designed for interactive programs, presentations, and broadcast of video content.

The class utilizes educational material on history, astronomy, and other disciplines. A lifelike display, electronic quizzes, and a surround-sound system transform the educational process into a journey with elements of virtual reality.

Classroom of new format

The Academy includes an educational multimedia class that is designed for interactive programs, presentations, and broadcast of video content.

The class utilizes educational material on history, astronomy, and other disciplines. A lifelike display, electronic quizzes, and a surround-sound system transform the educational process into a journey with elements of virtual reality.

Media center or visual arts studio

The Media Center is equipped with a virtual studio, a set of professional video cameras, lighting equipment, and modern video-editing workstations. Television journalism, camera work, film editing, photography, and animation are offered to the students of the Academy who can test themselves in each of these areas and decide whether it is for their liking, hone their mastery in the Studio of Visual Arts, and pursue the dream after a vocation has been chosen.

Museum of the palace guardians

Kamenny Island Palace, which houses the Talent Academy, is one of the most interesting cultural heritage sites in the city. Crowned and eminent owners of the palace have populated it with mysterious characters, created interesting traditions, left a multitude of unsolved mysteries, gave legends to the city, and bequeathed to keep the palace safe, tell the city about it, and recall the traditions and create new ones. This is with what the Palace Guardians are tasked. The Studio of the Palace Guardians is created for those students who love history. In the Studio, the children work with archives, become absorbed with studying the era when the palace was inhabited by Emperor Alexander I or the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, consolidate all of the historical facts, and tell the facts to their peers.

Studio equipment

With the help of an LCD panel and MS Kinect located in the Studio of the Palace Guardians, the team created a virtual fitting room, where visitors can try on historical costumes, take pictures, and send them to their e-mail addresses. However, this is not the end of a journey into history. The gallery of living paintings will impress even those who are not interested in history. A living painting is an LCD panel enclosed into a traditional painting frame with a web camera mounted to the top. The display shows a portrait of a historical figure, while the Web camera has a motion sensor. When a visitor approaches the painting, the figure goes live and tells a short story.

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