Specialists of Belgorodenergo invited schoolchildren to the "City, where electricity lives"

Staff IDGC of Centre — Belgorodenergo division and the Belgorod Regional Institute of Professional Development and Retraining of Specialists initiated and conducted for the participants of the regional stage of the All-Russian Academic Competition for life safety a regional contest for children “Schoolchild and electrical safety”.

82 schoolchildren from all the districts and cities of the region — schoolchildren in grades 9-11 arrived at the regional stage of the All-Russian Academic Competition for life safety this year. The contest for knowledge of the rules of electrical safety was not part of the Academic Competition, and, despite this, 40 young boys and girls, having united in teams of three, decided to try their hand at this difficult area.

According to the power engineers, the main purpose of the event — to instill into schoolchildren skills of safe behaviour near power facilities using new interactive forms of learning, and to assess the knowledge of the children in this area. The need for such contests is due to the fact that the “electrical safety” is presented fragmented at life safety lessons, which does not allow children to fully understand the danger that electricity can have.

The contest was held in four stages. In the first, theoretical stage, and, as it turned out, the most complicated, the children had 5 minutes to answer the “Academic Competition” questions related to the understanding of the electricity topic. All the participants completed the task much earlier than the deadline, demonstrating good knowledge of the electrical safety basics.

In the next creative stages the children coloured comics, collected themed puzzles with a stopwatch and according to the Olympic system played the game “City, where electricity lives”.

The first experimental contest showed that interactive educational forms are of the children’s interest. According to one of the participants, who also took part in the regional stage of the All-Russian Academic Competition for life safety Pavel Potischuk, they allow to develop creatively different logical thinking, and electrical safety rules in the modern world, in fact, should be studied along with the rules of behaviour in fires or floods.

Pavel’s point of view was supported by Fedor Verevka, a life safety teacher at Malakeevskaya secondary school of Veydelevsky district: “This knowledge will help the children in the future to save their lives. Children from an early age need to be told about electricity that is around them and the danger it has if not handled properly”.

Summarizing the results of the contest, Deputy Head of the Centre of Health Education of the Belgorod Regional Institute of Professional Development and Retraining of Specialists Albert Nikiforov underlined that thanks to the contest a set of new forms and methods of teaching had been determined in order to promote the safe life style and build skills for safe electricity handling.