Education Program for Gifted Youth

Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University
Location
Stanford University California United States
Information
Information	e-learning courses for gifted and talented students
Website	http://epgy.stanford.edu/

The Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University, is a loose collection of gifted education programs formerly located within Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies at Stanford University. The EPGY programs included distance and residential summer courses for students of all ages. Many of the courses were distance learning, meaning that courses were taught remotely via the Internet, rather than in the traditional classroom setting. Courses targeted students from elementary school up to advanced college graduate. Subjects offered included: Mathematics, English, Humanities, Physics, and Computer Science. Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies is similar to the Center for Talented Youth at the Johns Hopkins University in terms of certain objectives. The EPGY courses themselves were offered by a number of institutions including Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Currently, the individualized online courses are available through GiftedandTalented.com. The residential programs housed at Stanford University continue to be offered through Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies.

In the early 1960s, Stanford professors Patrick Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson began researching whether computers could be effectively used in schools to teach math and reading to children. At the time, their area of research was known as computer-aided education. Atkinson eventually left to pursue a career as an administrator (he would retire as President of the University of California), but Suppes stayed. Later Suppes extended his research to college-level material, and computer-based courses in Logic and Set Theory were offered to Stanford undergraduates from 1972 to 1992.

In 1985, Suppes received a "proof of concept" grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a computerized first-year calculus course with the initial objective of making it available to students in their last year of high school who were at schools that did not otherwise offer calculus. Suppes, together with a team that included Raymond Ravaglia, the former Executive Director of EPGY, began work on the course in earnest in 1987. When the course was ready for testing in 1990, the focus was turned to younger students who had been accelerated in their mathematics educations. For the summer of 1990, approximately 40 junior high and high school students with some knowledge of algebra were selected for a five-week instructor-taught accelerated precalculus course at Foothill College. Of those students, thirteen located at seven local schools were invited to take the computer-based calculus course during the subsequent school year, 1990-91. All thirteen took the Advanced Placement AB Calculus examination in May 1991. Six students scored 5, six scored 4, and one scored 3.

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