Specialised IT college for boys opens in Kazan

An IT college for gifted boys at Kazan Federal University on Saturday opened in Kazna.
President of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov, state secretary and deputy minister of sport of Russia Natalia Parshikova, Tatarstan Education and Science Ministry chief Albert Gilmutdinov and other officials were attendees.
“We should not in words but in deeds show our desire of our children being competitive, the best. Opening the college was part of the decision to build an IT cluster in Tatarstan. And we solved it quickly,” President of Tatarstan, invited to come onstage by a robot host, said in welcoming remarks.
“A time will come and we will be proud of scientists and businessmen appearing among college students,” R. Minnikhanov told the students. “We will try to do everything necessary for you to be successful.” President of Tatarstan gifted to the college a 45.5-million-rouble equipment certificate.
The opening ceremony that took place after the welcoming remarks was more original than the traditional ribbon cutting and involved robots and electronic keys.
The IT college is located on the grounds of the Universiade 2013 Village and is a compound including a training building and a residential facility, connected with a roofed passage. The school’s total space is 11,240 square metres.
IT college director, KFU mathematics graduate, Irek Fatkhutdinov said to the Tatar-inform correspondent 144 boys would study in the school, 140 of them residents in Tatarstan and four from Cheboksary. The school’s total capacity was 300 but this year only 7th and 8th year students had been accepted, he commented. Children would study there from the 7th to 11th years, he added.
Answering why although girls had taken selection tests eventually only boys had been accepted, I. Fatkhutdinov said:
“We studied the world’s best practices of boarding colleges and made the conclusion that most of the best schools were same-sex. Of course, we could not eliminate girls in the first stage, because we had to provide equal rights. We allowed both boys and girls to compete. But in the final stage we saw whose results were better. In our case it was boys, so the school became male. If there had been more girls passing the final stage, the school could have been made specialised for girls.”
“The basic school curriculum will be fully carried out. Natural and exact sciences are taught in-depth in addition to that, including physics, ,chemistry, biology, mathematics, information technology and economics. Importantly, all these subjects will be integrated with IT. we are going to have additional practical lessons on all the subjects, plus trips to university laboratories. We want to teach our children to think and hope they will in the future be able to create something essentially new”.