ITMO to Train Lecturers for St. Petersburg’s First IT School

ITMO University’s programs for educators will be available to teachers with professional degrees. Particular emphasis will be made on sharing the university’s experience in engaging school students in research, training them for contests, and teaching computer science while taking into account the rapid changes in the field. During training, teachers will be able to practice their soft skills and implement contemporary approaches into the educational process. At its core, the course is based on ITMO’s solid expertise in working with young talents and the university’s experience of training Moscow-based teachers who are currently employed by the capital city’s leading schools.

“Our task is to assist the city and the developer in making a modern school with a focus on IT and to train the school’s team, thus laying the groundwork for its development. Teachers, in their turn, will equip all students with digital competencies whether they aim to pursue chemistry, IT, or humanities. With the fast pace of change in technology and business, schools acquire a new mission: to offer students not only knowledge, but also an understanding of the ways it can be efficiently applied. At ITMO, we’ve accumulated substantial experience of working with teachers – in the past year alone, we’ve offered professional development programs for IT and physics educators; next, we will add more subjects. Starting with this project, we are carving out a new trajectory: we will be training entire teams for new schools – currently, we are negotiating with other real estate developers, as well,” shared ITMO Rector Vladimir Vasilyev.

“This is a unique case of a developer being fully engaged not only in a school’s construction, but also in improving the academic environment and providing methodological support of the academic process. I am certain that this will be a successful collaboration that will be replicated in other districts of the city and will engage leading universities such as ITMO,” added Pavel Rozov, the deputy head of the city’s Committee on Education. 

The program’s first graduates will go on to teach at the new school, which will offer a cross-cutting IT education with a digital approach to teaching and a focus on soft skills. There, students will be able to dip their toes into information technology for the first time. Apart from the compulsory curriculum, classes at the school will train students for competitions, prepare them for real-world projects and research, and equip them with programming skills, as well as the ability to apply digital tools and neural networks. The school is slated to open on September 1, 2025.

“We believe in thinking outside the box – focusing on opportunities instead of limitations. That’s why we can’t follow the standard approach in our work! Instead of building yet another ordinary school, we decided that our modern apartment complexes Modum and Ariosto need to have a unique, innovation-driven school beside them. It will naturally fit into the developing landscape of the city’s Primorsky District.

We are convinced that progress is made by people and especially young people – those who are full of energy, courage, and ambition. It is for them that we’ve developed the project. Only recently, it was just an outrageous idea and now it’s a major project that has brought together the professional teams of Arsenal Group and ITMO University,” commented Arseny Laptev, the CEO of Arsenal Group.

ITMO.NEWS Editorial team