The Game as an Instrument of Honors Students’ Personal Development in the SibFU Honors College

Honors colleges often serve as laboratories for pedagogical innovation, where new learning strategies and technologies are created both in the sphere of honors education and in the broader context of universities. This study describes a method of “organizational activity games” (OAG) introduced in the honors college of Siberian Federal University (SibFU) in Russia. The author explores the advantages of the game method for reaching the goal of honors students’ personal development. The theory and history of the game, invented in the Russian school of methodology by G. P. Shchedrovitskii, is explored in its relation to the theoretical principles of honors education. This research shows that the philosophy of games designed to create an intellectual elite of independently thinking citizens can be effectively employed in honors education. The study reveals how the objectives of the game—to develop and study new methods of teaching and learning in universities—contribute to the inventive pedagogies of honors colleges. The author provides insight into the various stages of the inaugural organizational activity game conducted at the SibFU Honors College. Results prove that the game may be regarded as a new method of honors teaching and learning applicable to honors programs in institutions worldwide

Mathematical modeling of thermal stabilization of vertical wells on high performance computing systems

Temperature stabilization of oil and gas wells is used to ensure stability and prevent deformation of a subgrade estuary zone. In this work, we consider the numerical simulation of thermal stabilization using vertical seasonal freezing columns. A mathematical model of such problems is described by a time-dependent temperature equation with phase transitions from water to ice. The resulting equation is a standard nonlinear parabolic equation. Numerical implementation is based on the finite element method using the package Fenics. After standard purely implicit approximation in time and simple linearization, we obtain a system of linear algebraic equations. Because the size of freezing columns are substantially less than the size of the modeled area, we obtain mesh refinement near columns. Due to this, we get a large system of equations which are solved using high performance computing systems.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Complexes of dipolar excitons in layered quasi-two-dimensional nanostructures

We discuss neutral and charged complexes (biexciton and trion) formed by indirect excitons in layered quasi-two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures. Indirect excitons -- long-lived neutral Coulomb-bound pairs of electrons and holes of different layers -- have been known for semiconductor coupled quantum wells and are recently reported for van der Waals heterostructures such as bilayer graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides. Using the configuration space approach, we derive the analytical expressions for the trion and biexciton binding energies as functions of the interlayer distance. The method captures essential kinematics of complex formation to reveal significant binding energies, up to a few tens of meV for typical interlayer distances ~3-5 A, with the trion binding energy always being greater than that of the biexciton. Our results can contribute to the understanding of more complex many-body phenomena such as exciton Bose-Einstein condensation and Wigner-like electron-hole crystallization in layered semiconductor heterostructures.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 105 references. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1605.0234