(Globe and Mail-Canada) Margaret Wente - The Hemda Center for Science Education in Tel Aviv is one of the world's great schools for bright kids. It recruits fantastic teachers to give them advanced instruction in physics and chemistry. It is unabashedly merit-based. "We recruit for the ability to solve problems," said Tehilla Ben Gai, the school's director. "B and C students are sometimes smarter than A students....We're looking for students who are creative - and we teach them that science is fun." Every year, they are divided into teams and given a zany practical problem to solve. (One was: Devise a way to walk on water.) There's also a yearly safe-cracking competition, in which teams of students construct computer-protected boxes and other teams have to figure out how to break into them.
2013-05-17 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive