This is an All–Ukrainian conference for young teenage leaders who are looking for opportunities to solve problems locally and globally.

Do you dream of overcoming bullying at schools, restoring an old cinema in your town or city, inventing eco-friendly leather substitutes or installing sorting bins in your school? These changes require opinion leaders who will inspire and promote important ideas. You can be one of them!

TED-Ed Weekend Conference is a great opportunity to improve your public speaking, research and information structuring skills. And if your speech is successful, you can share your ideas with an international audience in New York!

You will surely improve your public speaking skills and your English. Because to participate you need to have at least Upper-Intermediate (B2) level. During the preparation for the conference, you will take a course of free lessons where you will get some public speaking tips from teachers and mentors. And at the end of these lessons, your speech will be video recorded and posted on the official TED platform. So that thousands of people from all over the world will see it!

You will also learn how to structure your speech, to visualize thoughts in presentation, to use spot-on slogans and headlines, and to look for interesting and non-obvious examples. Although the speech itself is an individual piece of work, you will be taking lessons in a team. So, get ready to network with interesting people!

Finally, if you are nominated for a trip to the World TED Conference, you will get a chance to visit New York and to exchange ideas at the international level. Ukraine has only been in TED selection for three years, but we are already making progress. Our student Yuliia Melnychuk became the first participant of the world TED-Ed Weekend. By the way, now Yuliia is a mentor and she will help you prepare for the event :)

TED-Ed Weekend is an all-Ukrainian conference for young leaders aged 13-17. The final stage takes place at the TED New York headquarters, one of the world's largest lecture halls. Influencers who want to share important change-making thoughts with the whole world speak there. Therefore, if you have such an idea, let's prepare the speech and apply for the selection!

The national selection and participants training in Ukraine are held by Brainy English language school of Junior Academy of Sciences. The school organizes the TED-Ed Club project and invites students from 13 to 17 years old to participate.

About changes you want to implement and how to do it. About issues that you consider to be important and want to draw attention to. About your own experience that can help others. The topic of your speech should be creative and relevant, and it should be valuable for you and the audience.

These can be global issues concerning public policy, multinational corporations, or international space programs. Or local or even personal ones, about the benefits of gardening for mental health, a flexible schedule at your school, or a way to use social networks to one’s advantage.

The main thing is to decide on the idea that you want to spread, and Brainy English will help you structure your speech and make it suitable for the TED-Ed format. Or you can choose the topic of your speech together with our mentors!

First of all, you have to join the Ukrainian TED-Ed Club. It is part of Brainy English language school. Enrollment takes place twice a year. For 13 weeks, club members attend a course of lessons where they analyze different aspects of public speaking. At the end of the course, they prepare a video recording of their speech in English. The video is published on the TED-Ed platform.

Meanwhile, the TED-Ed team announces the beginning of the application process for the international conference. Ukrainian mentors nominate 3-5 participants with the best presentations. The criteria of evaluation is the importance and creativity of the ideas spread, whether they contain the author's own experience, and what solutions they offer to solve certain problems.
The deadline for video submission is eight months before the beginning of the conference. In a few weeks, experts will select about 15-20 participants from all over the world and invite them to speak in New York. And some contestants will be invited as guests of the conference.

In New York, you will get to the TED World Theater, the main hall for international TED conferences. You will attend workshops, lectures, presentations by other participants, take a city tour and communicate with interesting people from different countries and of different professions.

If you are selected to participate in the conference, the International Relations Department of the National Center "JASU'' will help you with your trip arrangements: getting an American visa, booking a flight and accommodation, and also taking care of you in the United States. The state represented by the NC “JASU” will cover all your expenses.

Your parents or a mentor can chaperone you, but if they can't, someone from the JAS team will be there for you!

You can find information about Ukrainian TED-Ed club selection on Brainy English Facebook and Instagram, and also follow JAS official Instagram and Facebook pages not to miss anything interesting.

Learn more about the TED-Ed conference on Instagram and Facebook, and watch other participants' presentations on their YouTube channel.