Fifteenth Gymnasium (), previously called, and still better known as MIOC (Matematičko informatički obrazovni centar; Mathematical Informatical Educational Center) is a public high school in Zagreb, Croatia. It specializes in mathematics and computer science.
History
The school was founded as Fifteenth Mathematical Gymnasium (XV. matematička gimnazija) in 1964. It was among the first schools in former Yugoslavia specializing in mathematics along with Mathematical Gymnasium (Matematička gimnazija) in Belgrade.
The first principal was Stefanija Bakarić, sister of Vladimir Bakarić, one of the leading politicians in the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the chairman of the League of Communists of Croatia at the time. The original curriculum was composed with the help from acclaimed university professors Svetozar Kurepa, Branislav Marković and Vladimir Devide. At the beginning, most of the teachers were university professors.
In 1965, it became the first school in Croatia to have information science as a school subject. Students first got the chance to work on actual computers in 1980.
In 1977, the school, now in a new building, merged with Seventh Gymnasium (VII. gimnazija) and Fourteenth Gymnasium (XIV. gimnazija, also then known as 25. maj). The newly founded school was named Education Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (Matematičko informatički obrazovni centar), abbreviated as MIOC. The school is still informally widely known under that name.
Denis Kuljiš, a known Croatian political columnist and opinion maker, himself an alumnus of XV. gimnazija, argues that at this point the quality of the school started to go down, since the teachers at other schools involved in the merger were not up to the standards of the school.
In 1982, MIOC was renamed to MIOC Vladimir Popović.
In 1991, after the fall of Communism, the school changed its name and was once again known as Fifteenth Gymnasium.
In 2007, the management of the school planned to hold a celebration of its thirty years of existence which sparked strong protests from alumni who graduated before 1977. In the end, the school held the celebration while mentioning both 1964 and 1977 as important dates in the history of the school.
Building
The school moved to the current building in Jordanovac, which is in the Maksimir neighborhood of Zagreb, in the seventies. Before that, it was located in an older building in Sutlanska street. The new building was built especially for this purpose and thus contains some of the infrastructure that schools in Zagreb, Croatia and the whole Balkan region lack. There are two gyms, an outdoor sports center, a cafeteria and a movie theater.
In 2008, the third wing of the building was opened. With an increased number of classrooms, the classes now take place only in the morning while afternoons are reserved for extracurricular activities, a relative rarity among Croatian schools.
Curriculum
There are around 1200 students divided into two parts: the so-called "national program" and the International Baccalaureate program.
In the national program, the students follow the curriculum of mathematical - natural scientific gymnasium, as outlined by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports (Ministarstvo znanosti, obrazovanja i športa). There are three sub-programs, the "Information Science" program which has an additional weekly hour of mathematics and an additional weekly hour of computer science, the Mathematics program. with two additional weekly hours of mathematics, and the "General" program with two weekly hours of a second foreign language, usually German.
The International Baccalaureate program, implemented at the school in 1991, is not publicly funded but is instead financed by student tuitions. In it, the school follows the usual IB curriculum, divided into two segments: IB Middle Years Programme (grades 9 and 10) and IB Diploma Programme (grades 11 and 12). Around 200 Croatian and foreign students are in IB classes. All the classes are conducted in English.
Extracurricular Activities and Successes
University students work along full-time teachers preparing the students, which is a rather uncommon way of preparing used only in a few Croatian schools and a few more schools in the Balkans.
Among most notable international results are multiple successes, both in team and single events, at: International Olympiad in Informatics International Mathematical Olympiad International Physics Olympiad International Astronomy Olympiad International Junior Science Olympiad.