About Kinderuni
Promoting bilingual education with CLIL

The concept of a children’s university is widespread in Germany: most German universities offer teaching units led by well-known professors to children ages 8 to 12.

But don’t worry—we won’t force your child to memorize formulas or take exams. On the contrary, our quirky Professor Einstein, his capable helper Sophie Schlau and the endearing robot JOWO will explain complex scientific phenomena in a manner that’s both fun and easy to understand.

In its structure, our children’s university is very similar to a normal university. The children enroll in 3 subject areas, each comprising 15 lectures:

 
By solving a series of unusual—and rather non-scholastic—assignments, your young student will collect badges that help him or her advance through the university’s course of studies: after completing a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate of Science, your child will graduate from the university as a full professor.

This elaborate system is based on a highly successful modern didactic method called “gamification.”

We wanted our university to be completely accessible to the public. In today’s world, there is only one method of achieving this – by going online. This gives every child, even in the farthest corners of the country, the opportunity to develop an interest in the sciences.
 
Besides, children need to learn how to work with different media – media literacy is not yet taught in schools and therefore most media users are not sufficiently media literate. The digital children’s university helps children learn to work with media in a knowledgeable and responsible manner.

The earlier a child is immersed in foreign languages, the more likely it is that that child will learn multiple languages with ease. Current didactic methodology has proven that learning languages is more interesting and easier if, instead of learning from a textbook, like we’re used to, children learn using the so-called CLIL method (content and language integrated learning). The idea is a simple one: students immediately put a foreign language to use in a variety of new assignments. A student might, for example, do a physical experiment, solve an exercise, and write down the results—all in German.
 
Germany has a rich tradition in the sciences. It is the country where the printing press, the lightbulb, the telephone, the dynamo, the car, the diesel motor, and the MP3 format were invented, vacuums and X-rays were discovered and the theory of relativity was developed.
 
Today, German is the world’s second-most-important language for scientific study, and Germany ranks third in funding for scientific research, making it a significant contributor to the advancement of science.

Don't hesitate to enroll your child in the German Digital Kinderuniversity! Our university is bilingual: Lectures are in German and in English with English and German subtitles.

The Kinderuni is not a language school. Its main goal is to introduce children to the world of science. Learning a few words in German is a bonus. 

The workload is entirely up to you and your child. Once a child begins a task, it's likely that he or she will be fascinated with and and won't want to stop. Especially in the first years of school, however, it is important that parents track their learning progress. Studying at the Kinderuni is most effective with 2-3 hours of work per week, no more than 30 minutes per day. This also ensures that your child's vision is not impaired.

A majority of the videos are from the popular and generation-spanning German TV show “Sendung mit der Maus” (The Show with the Mouse). Didactic materials and experiments were developed by didactic experts of the Goethe-Institut. The online implementation was done by the German agency “KIDS Interactive” which specializes in children's media.