Education Program for Gifted Youth

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The EPGY logo.

The Education Program for Gifted Youth, hosted at Stanford University, is a gifted education program with distance and summer courses for students of all ages. It is a distance learning program, meaning that courses are taken remotely via the Internet, rather than the traditional classroom setting. Courses range from elementary level to the advanced-undergraduate level. Subjects include: Mathematics, English, Humanities, Physics, and Computer Science. It is very similar to the Center for Talented Youth program founded by Johns Hopkins University in its objectives.

1 History
2 Online High School
3 Summer Institutes
4 External link

[edit] History

In the early 1960s, Stanford professors Patrick Suppes and Richard 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 first-year calculus course on computer. 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 calculus course. All thirteen took the Advanced Placement AB Calculus examination in May 1991, with six student scoring 5, six scoring 4, and one scoring 3.

Following this initial success, computer-based courses in Beginning Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, and Precalculus were created to replace the accelerated summer course. These courses were tested during the 1991-92 academic year with a new group of students. At the same time, the calculus course was expanded to include the material necessary for the BC examination. That year four students took the BC examination, with all scoring 5.

In Fall 1992, after porting the software to the Windows operating system, the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) was formally launched at Stanford University, making these courses available to qualified students.

[edit] Online High School

Most recently, EPGY at Stanford received a substantial and generous gift to found a comprehensive Online High School for gifted and talented youth. The OHS officially commenced in the fall of 2006, with an extended set of courses in the humanities and social sciences. The inaugural course catalog featured many challenging Humanities courses, characteristic of the EPGY programs.

[edit] Summer Institutes

In addition to internet-based courses for accelerated students, Stanford hosts the Summer Institutes in July and August. These are three or five-week long seminar classes offered to exceptional high school students from across the world. The Summer Institutes are well known for the rigor of curriculum and quality of research allowed to the participating students. Classes vary by year, but routinely include humanities and English survey courses, physics and mathematics seminars, and programs in computer science.

The university also offers the Middle School Program ("MSP"), which bridges the gap between the Center for Talented Youth level of study and the more intensive EPGY.