MORE than 400 children turned up at the Bermuda College for a chance to prove their genius and qualify for Bermuda's first centre for gifted youth.

The new Institute for Talented Students hopes to help students who excel academically. It will offer intense programmes in maths and English. The students will also be able to take part in programmes offered by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Talented Youth that inspired the Bermuda programme.

"Once we put the word out, parents were calling at all hours to find out how their children could take the test," said the institute's founder, Riquette Bonne-Smith. To select the talented students, Mrs. Bonne-Smith invited educational experts from Johns Hopkins Centre for Talented Youth in Maryland to administer the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) to children aged ten to 14. The test is normally only given to 16- and 17-year-olds.

"The centre has existed as part of the Johns Hopkins University for 22 years," said Barbara Hoffman, the centre's director of international programmes. The centre has helped to set up similar programmes all over the world.

"Johns Hopkins is the international leader in a lot of arenas, particularly in the medical and scientific field. The institute was started by Dr. Julian Stanley."

According to the centre's web site, www.jhu.edu/~gifted, in 1972, Dr. Stanley, a psychology professor at the Johns Hopkins University, introduced the first talent search designed to identify, challenge and reward academically-able young people. Since 1979, the Centre for Talented Youth has been expanded to include a variety of academic opportunities, research, information dissemination, consultation, with educational organisations, public policy initiatives and diagnostic and counselling services.

"He is now 86 years old and still comes to work," said Dr. Hoffman. "There were children brought to his attention who were super bright in the maths arena. He thought if there is one like this there might be others.

"He had also been on the board for the SAT test. He was always interested in education. When he came off that board he said, `Why don't we give the SAT as part of the programme?' He needed some way to measure the children's talents. If the child was talented, the child wouldn't even have to think about any test that was on his grade level. The question is: How do we find the level where he won't get them all right?"

Johns Hopkins Centre for Talented Youth programme director Linda Barnett said Dr. Stanley started out with only boys and mathematics.

"Then other parents heard about it," she said. "Some of them had girls. Some of them were talented in English, but not math.

"Talent is uneven, some children are highly gifted in all arenas, but many of them are not. "Some are only highly gifted in verbal ability or highly gifted in math."

Dr. Hoffman said in the early days, talented kids were sent directly off to college.

"Some children should go, but for most of them, it is not a good idea for their emotional development," she said. "They may not be evenly brilliant and still need to be with eighth graders for some things.

"That's how the centre's summer programme got started. It is six weeks in the summer-time for almost 9,000 students in the United States. There are a lot of children out there."

The centre now offers a number of options for children, including long-distance learning.