Saeed Arida is the founder and Chief Excitement Officer at NuVu Studio. He recently completed a PhD in Design and Computation at the Architecture School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Saeed’s doctoral research focused on teaching creativity and ultimately developed into NuVu. Saeed, along with the NuVu team, has been working for three years to bring his vision of innovative education to reality. Prior to NuVu, he taught graduate architectural design studios at MIT and advised students’ theses projects. His portfolio of products and solutions includes Hugah, an online home exchange service, a limited series MIT Gradrat Ring, and product commercials for LG, Samsung and Microsoft.

How to Sell (Almost) Anything (C)
Tired of lemonade stands? Think you could design the first edible iPad? Have an idea but don't know how to get other people interested?  Come be a part of a team designing the ultimate chocolate bar and then convince the other people in the room that your product is superior to all the others.  Which company will emerge as the pot de creme de la creme?

No chocolate bars will be harmed in the course of this session.

Stephen R. Balzac is a consultant, author, and speaker. He is the president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepshead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck and turn problems into opportunities.

Steve has over twenty years of experience in the high tech industry as an engineer, manager, entrepreneur, and consultant. He is a popular speaker on topics ranging from leadership, innovation, learning, sport performance, and game design. He has been a guest lecturer at WPI and MIT. Steve is the author of The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development, published by McGraw-Hill and is a contributing author to Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play. His articles have appeared in many journals, including The CEO Refresher, Corp! Magazine, Performance & Profits, The Journal of Interactive Drama, The IBM Systems Journal, The Lincoln Journal, Mass High Tech, Analog, Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, and the Worcester Business Journal.

No stranger to the demands of maintaining peak performance under highly competitive and stressful situations, Steve is a fifth degree blackbelt in jujitsu and a former nationally ranked fencer.

Sarah Breslau is an unschooler pursuing areas of the arts ranging from writing to chain maille to theater, leaving all too little time to simply read.  She is an actress in i Sebastiani (The Greatest Commedia dell'Arte Troupe in the Entire World).

Improvisation Games (C)
Play some games that are guaranteed to make you think fast and crack up!  Improvisation is the art of acting without a script, and the only limit is your own imagination.  The improv games we’ll be playing are designed to make you (and your audience) laugh out loud.  We’ll also prove that necessity really is the mother of invention; you’ll be amazed by what you can come up with.

We’re Going On A Quest! (C)
Searching for the Shining Purple Crystal of Fire and Water? Hunting for a vial of super-poisonous Doomsnake venom?  Whatever you’re looking for, finding it is not going to be easy undefined especially when everyone you meet on your journey tries to make your task even more difficult! But don’t worry undefined by the end, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Arika Cohen is absurdly delighted to be teaching and learning again at Beyond I.Q.!  Arika spends her days in Jamaica Plain, MA, making -and frequently tasting- mud pies with the infants, toddlers, and preschool-aged kiddos at Horizons for Homeless Children. Her past gigs include teaching Lower, Middle, and Upper School Drama, designing costumes for children’s theatres, and, in general, making a great deal of mess and noise.

Conversation on Current Events (C)
What do you know about what’s going on around us?  Tsunami’s, Egypt, Libya, Ivory Coast, budget talks… let’s get involved in the news of the world.

TBA

Puzzles and Pasttimes (C)
Tops and tessellations and a host of other activities! (Okay, this doesn't have a great blurb, but the activity will be a lot of fun!)

Introduction to Linguistics (C)
A brief introduction to the world of linguistics, this workshop is designed to get people to think about something many of us take for granted: language, its sounds, construction, meaning, and uses. Participants will have opportunities to work through various linguistic puzzles dealing with phonology, morphology, and syntax

Egyptian Mythology (C)
Jackal-headed gods! Hawks that carry the sun! Cows in the sky! Dung beetles...? Come learn about the varied gods of ancient Egypt and the ridiculous situations they continually get themselves into.

Raisa Lardie is a senior at Hofstra University's Honors College, pursuing a double major in anthropology and linguistics, with a minor in Japanese. She's currently in the process of completing a senior thesis on nonrecognition for American Indian nations and publishing an article on the environmental effects of the oil/gas industry on the Nentsy reindeer-herders of Siberia, and will be going to Russia for two months this summer to continue her Russian studies.

Outside of school, her interests include traditional archery, color guard, gaming, foreign language acquisition, cosplay, history and a host of other topics too numerous to list here. (She's also recently become interested in world politics, to her dismay and curiosity!)

Arts & Crafts (C)
Come play with a variety of materials and let your creative side loose!

Susan Eiseman Levitin comes to BIQ from a long background of art and education. This is her fifth year attending and presenting. Currently, she homeschools her 12, 14 and 18 year olds, and is an active member of a number of homeschooled communities.

Nancy Norton is a psychologist who does therapy/coaching and learning/neuropsychological assessments with kids and adults. She is interested about how people think and what can get in the way, especially in the area of executive functions! In her practice Think About Thinking, Nancy is passionate about helping students, parents and teachers work together as a team to bring out kids strengths while building up any skills that need improvement. Nancy and her husband home school their ten year old daughter.

First Time BIQ Attendees

Underachievement: A Matter of Definitions

Josh Shaine is a migrant teacher, working for homeschool families, public and private schools, and whatever else comes down the pike. He works predominantly with gifted children, with a focus on underachievers and hg/pg issues. He is also slowly researching non-linear thinking styles.

Lorel Shea is geeky enough to admit that she met her husband in Mensa and that they have two boys named after sci-fi characters and two girls named after literary characters.  She lives with her husband and kids in Connecticut's “quiet corner” where she presides as headmistress of Shea Academy.

Bumblebots (C)
Description: Build a bitty toy that buzzes like a bug! Work with a partner to design where to place the motor and legs before attaching them to a base. Then skitter your critter over tricky terrain to see which bumblebot is the most a-maze-ing! (All supplies are provided for this hands-on studio and each pair of participants decides who takes home the bumblebot.)

Sean Stevens Since Sean was six years old, he has always taken things apart to see how they worked. This innate curiosity about how things work lead him to explore computer programming, human perception, robotics, alternative energy, Sound, lighting, LASERs, Interactivity, the internet, and how it can all tie into community. He discovered that most complex systems can be considered to be made of modules. With the right input and output, these modules can be made to act independently.

Melinda Stewart Currently the Director of Counseling at Groton School in Groton, MA, Ms. Stewart has worked with gifted children and adolescents in a variety of settings over the last 28 years.  She is the founder and former director of Voyagers, Inc., and has been on the staffs of the Stone Center at Wellesley College and McLean Hospital.  She is the mother of two PG children, one currently in college and one currently homeschooled.

Free Style Costuming & Art (C)
Use your imagination, create a costume from our vast collection of art supplies, fabrics, ribbons and trim, make some yarn hair falls to top everything off, or, take your artistic talents and draw, cut and glue to your heart’s content.

Persis Thorndike has been running Children's programming at science fiction conventions, home schooling, and gifted and talented conferences for the past 7 years, and has assisted in the activities room at the New England Folk Festival for over 10 years. Mother of a home-schooled 13-year-old, Persis draws from a broad range of interests to plan captivating and entertaining children's activities to keep kids in the 6-12 age range happy and occupied at conferences and conventions.
Children's programs designed and overseen: ConCertino 1999, 2003, 2006 Noreascon 4, 2004 (World Science Fiction Convention)Arisia 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Boskone 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Learning In Our Own Way home schooling conference, August 2005  Beyond IQ conference May 2006, April 2007, May 2008.
Assisted with: Torcon 3, 2003 (World Science Fiction Convention) Beyond IQ conference May 2004 NEFFA children's activities room, 1996-2006 Maryland Fairy Festival May 2005, May 2006 LA Con IV, September 2006.

Forests & Trees: How the Asperger's Brain Thinks
Learn more about the two brain chemicals (serotonin and acetylcholine) that mediate two different modes of analytical thought and how the substitution of one for the other explains the cognitive style of Asperger's. The "disorder" turns out to be an adaptation that allows analytical thought even without the brain chemistry usually required to support it.

Eric Van entered Harvard in 1972 as one of future Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow's particle physics tutees and graduated in 1978 as one of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop's students. He has spent the last six years back at Harvard, as a Special Student affiliated with the Graduate Department of Psychology, taking 20 undergraduate courses in the field in preparation for an eventual Ph.D. He lives in Watertown, Mass.

David Wang is a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, where his current research focuses on planning for autonomous systems. The goal of which is to be able to command a system via high level commands such as goals it must accomplish and have the system determine the appropriate course of action. For his Masters, he studied techniques for improving software-reliability. Outside of work, he pursues a wide variety of interests, from building robots and planes to teaching. He was an organizer for the 6.270, Lego Robotics Competition for 3 years, and helped teach a variety of computers, programming, and algorithm courses over 5 years. He holds degrees in Aeronautics/ Astronautics and Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from MIT.

Mary Ellen Wessels has a double M.Ed. in Curriculum and Arts Integration but that doesn't stop her from wanting school to be more joyful , playful and creative.  She is also a musician, a mother of two sons (2E) and 3 grown up step daughters and has far too many interests for the time available!

Daniel Wilder is a philosophy major at UMass Boston, with more books than time and a passion for music and theater.  He is an actor in i Sebastiani (The Greatest Commedia dell'Arte Troupe in the Entire World) and is in the process of developing his own scenario for the troupe.

Catherine Williams is a visual artist and dancer, who has been teaching dance for over 20 years.
For the past few years, she has been choreographing works that use professional and amateur dancers of all ages, from 5 to 70.
These dances have primarily been set to music of local musicians.  Her solo work includes: "Sicilienne" by Gabriel Fauré, "Shape of My Heart" by Sting, and "The Tuft of Flowers" by Robert Frost.

Straight Talk about Testing and Assessment
Testing and assessment are huge topics within the world of giftedness, and there's a lot of incomplete, confusing, inaccurate, and downright mythological information kicking around.  In this informal and open-ended talk, I will explain various types of cognitive, academic, behavioral, and psychological tests, what they can and cannot tell us, how they are designed and normed, and how we can go beyond mere numbers to thoughtful interpretation. I will also talk about how clients can participate more meaningfully in the process.  Bring your questions!

Avoiding the Strange Attractor: Giftedness as a Cultural Experience
It is the strange attractor of how the professional world approaches giftedness.  All psychological research, all educational programming, starts inevitably with the question of how one operationally defines and measures intelligence -- without that, it seems intuitively obvious, no other questions can be posed.  Yet this task is fundamentally impossible.  Thus, the field continually returns to the gravitational pull of this strange attractor, and almost no work can be done on the questions of real interest to those of us in gifted psychology.  In this informal talk, I will explain why the fields of psychology and education are so stuck, and propose an alternative conception that allows us to escape the attractor and have our voices heard.

Aimee Yermish, Psy.D. is an educational therapist specializing in work with children who are gifted, learning-disabled, or twice-exceptional, providing assessment, enrichment, remediation, mentoring, individualized program development, and parent and teacher guidance. She draws upon her analytical background as a research scientist and her practical background as a classroom teacher in order to create individualized strategies for each child. (aimee@davincilearning.org)