Gimnazija Zajecar - Partner from Serbia

Gimnazija Zajecar is one of the oldest high schools in Serbia with tradition longer than 180 years. Over 360 students follow one of the four courses 1. mathematics and natural sciences 2. social and language sciences 3. general education and 4. program for gifted students for computer sciences. Our primary goal is to prepare students to continue their education at the universities. Our school has 59 employees. 

In 2018 we have been elected as one of twenty school ambassadors in project STEM label. We take great pride in our achievements with students gifted for physics, mathematics and computer sciences. Currently in our school students learn English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Awareness about ecological footprint, recycling and upcycling is at a low level in Serbia. We hope to create lesson plans and activities that can be implemented in current school’s curriculum and that would help students better understand the importance of this topic. We believe that in collaboration with other schools our students would raise awareness of problems with uncontrolled use of natural resources.

The curriculum in Serbia leaves teachers with a short amount of time they have to dedicate to environment and climate changes, but this can be changed if we develop lesson plans with activities that can easily be implemented in the classroom. We also plan to learn more about existing systems that our partners use to reduce waste in their schools, so that we can create an action plan for reducing use of resources and present it to our local community so that our future development can be planned in accordance with EU standards. Finally we want to help our students get experience in a multinational project. It is our firm stand that they should meet other cultures as we believe that in the future they will collaborate more and more. By giving students the opportunity, not just to be the hosts, but to work together with students from other countries we will give them a great start at mutual future of European nations. The school board will appoint the school’s team for the project as well as list substitute teachers if needed. A group of 10 teachers will be in charge of working on program activities during and between mobilities. As an IT partner our students will create a website and android application that will calculate individual ecological footprints.

For more than 10 years we have been working with AFS (American field service), an international student exchange organization and each year, several students go to annual education in countries around the world. Students from other countries (Turkey, Mexico, Italy, Thailand, New Zealand, Germany ...) attend our annual exchange. We have been selected as one of 20 school ambassadors for STEM label project and we are the second school in Europe to obtain STEM proficient label. In collaboration with students from Spain our students won a main award at STEM4YOUTH and visited CERN. We collaborate with Scientix project and working on implementing more eTwinning projects in our school.

Our students have participated in many regional, national and international competitions and in last three years won 10 state awards in physics and 11 in math. Mathematics and physics are particularly distinguished by the number of awards, which is why we plan to contribute to the project from these subjects. We also plan to share knowledge gained from our current KA1 project about problem based learning.