Campus and Community

Técnico welcomes 3rd cycle students for the second week of summer activities at ULisboa

Participants had more than a dozen games and activities to explore the School and some of its student groups.

There’s a lot of noise in the Computer Room of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering on the Alameda campus of the Instituto Superior Técnico. This time it’s not animated conversations between students that fill the space, nor the constant clacking of keyboards as they program, but bananas that beep in different tones when pressed. This is one of the activities of Summer at the University of Lisbon (ULisboa), an initiative that, from July 8 to 12, introduced Técnico to more than two hundred students from the 3rd cycle of basic education, after having welcomed another two hundred secondary school students the previous week.

It is these students who now decide the frequencies (and, consequently, the tones and notes) that touching each banana will trigger in the electrical circuit they are connected to, trying to reproduce music they know using this tropical, potassium-rich instrument. “We were also able to create our own melodies,” Manuel shares enthusiastically, adding that the week of activities ‘opened his mind to the various areas within engineering’.

Alongside this activity, there was plenty to choose from. Operating a hydraulic claw with syringes full of water (using pulls and pushes on its plungers), building rockets to launch at the end of the week, a peddy-paper that took students from one end of the Alameda campus to the other answering riddles and building a bridge that could withstand the greatest possible load are just a few examples of the many initiatives that Técnico’s monitors and student group members organized for the participants.

At the Oeiras hub, participants were able to try out activities related to supply chain management, programming a car, designing a website, magic lenses for Snapchat filters and even developing a video game. Given the variety on offer, Guilherme is pleased. “This week is going beyond my expectations – I thought they were just geeks who would spend all day in front of the computer,” confesses the third-grader. Madalena, also at the Oeiras campus, recommends the summer week at ULisboa “because you make new friends and it’s a lot of fun to have new experiences”.

And it seems that these friendships are made to last – at the traditional closing ceremony with the launch of rockets built by the participants themselves, in Alameda, a new ritual takes shape. As the rockets they have built are launched one after the other, whizzing through the air under a shower of applause, the students, armed with felt-tip markers, write, scribble and tear on each other’s T-shirts, leaving autographs and messages so that, in the future, they will remember a week well spent at Técnico. Many before studying here, possibly.