The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program allows the nation?s brightest children to explore and expand their brain power, Director Elizabeth Albert said.
The courses in the program, which is similar to a summer school, condense a year?s worth of information into three-week sessions. The program is offered to gifted second- through 12th-graders. The younger students meet at Garrison Forest School in Owings Mills and the older students at the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus in Baltimore City.
In the robotics class, about 13 11-year-old boys program Legos to become robots that can communicate through blinking lights. Eleven-year-old ambassadors in another class act as a model United Nations to discuss issues that perplex the world?s leaders, such as the war in Iraq. Other children study fake crime scenes and learn how to analyze DNA. The program gives the gifted students a challenge and a social scene.
“Often, they have a hard time in the early years of school because they?re so out of sync with their peers,” Albert said. “We encourage them to not lose momentum.”
