When I was in middle school, we had a self-contained gifted class that worked on a lot of different theme-based projects. Those I remember are: individual science fair projects, Amnesty International (social awareness, letter writing, global concerns), card playing (math, risk-taking, odds of winning, gambling even), paleontology, architecture (designing our dream house, scale, modeling), etc.
Our public sd no longer has anything for gifted middle schoolers, but a couple of years ago they offered robotics or online foreign language classes.
Personally I love the idea of all these enrichment opportunities to explore more nontraditional subjects, but if I had to choose between that and accelerated/enriched core subjects, I would have to choose the acceleration. As my DD has said, no one gifted class could make up for sitting through mind-numbing core classes below her ability level.
