The Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

The Junior Academy of Sciences (JAS, the Academy) of Ukraine is an educational system that aims at providing the organization and coordination of students’ research activities, creating conditions for their intellectual and creative development, spiritual advance, and vocational self-determination to support the scientific potential growth of the country.

Founded nearly 70 years ago, the Academy passed through several stages of its formation and development. The precondition for the extracurricular education entity to be launched was the organization of the extracurricular education institutions’ scientific student clusters the network of which was formed in the 1920s–1940s. According to the USSR Academy of Sciences’ request to strengthen patronage over the children’s scientific organizations in 1939, there was adopted the Resolution on Patronage over the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers Concerning the Work with Talented Children and Youth, so that the scientific clusters got to work in most Ukrainian large cities during next 10 years. Later on, the separate clusters and sections join the students’ scientific societies. Thus, in 1947 there was launched the Science and Technology Students’ Society on the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers base, with the first students’ theoretical and practical conference held in Kyiv in 1950. The first mass scientific entity was the Junior Academy of Sciences of Crimea named “Iskatel’” (“seeker” in English) and established in 1963, this experience became the basis to finding Junior academies of sciences in different Ukrainian regions in the 1960s-1980s.