There’s a lot of noise in the Computer Room of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Técnico – Alameda campus. This time it’s not animated conversations between students, nor the constant keyboard noise, but bananas that beep in different tones when pressed. This is one of the activities of “Verão na ULisboa”, a summer initiative organised by Universidade de Lisboa (ULisboa), from 8 to 12 July, held at Técnico that brought together around three hundred students from the 3rd cycle of basic education, after having welcomed another two hundred secondary school students the previous week.
These students 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 songs they know using this tropical, potassium-rich instrument. ‘We were also able to create our melodies,’ Manuel shares enthusiastically, adding that this week’s activities “opened his mind to the different types of engineering”.
During the week there were plenty of activities organised by Técnico student monitors and Students’ Organisations, such as 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 to walk around the Alameda campus, answering riddles and building a bridge that could withstand the greatest possible load.
At the Oeiras campus, participants tried out activities related to supply chain management, programming a car, designing a website, magic lenses for Snapchat filters, and even developing a video game. Guilherme, a 3rd cycle student, is pleased. ‘This week is going beyond my expectations – I thought they were just nerds who would spend all day in front of the computer,’ he confesses. Madalena, also a student attending the activities at the Oeiras campus, recommends the “Verão na Ulisboa” ‘because we 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, which involves the launch of rockets built by the participants at the Alameda campus, a new ritual is taking shape. As the rockets are launched one after the other under a shower of applause, the students 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 of them before studying here, possibly.
