The clock had not yet struck 10 a.m. and several people were already waiting to attend the Técnico Open Day, a free event that offered the community more than 100 activities linked to the School. Until 5 p.m., more than two thousand people visited the Alameda campus and had the opportunity to attend talks, information sessions with Técnico students, guided tours, interactive experiments and a science fair where around 40 research projects were on display.

The Open Day was organised in collaboration of the Departments, Research Units and Students’ organisations, and showcased projects in various branches of engineering, science, technology and architecture. In one of the exhibition stands at the science fair, visitors could see drawings of various cartoon characters in petri dishes covered in bacteria – it’s not every day that you find a colony of Escherichia coli arranged in the shape of Peppa Pig. Further along, visitors could look through a microscope at the ‘ball structures’ that make up the mould that commonly attacks food at home, as well as hold a bottle containing beer produced with treated wastewater, fit for consumption.

Still in the same room, a structure made of plastic rods oscillated above a plate, simulating the response of a building to an earthquake. On the next table, goblets filled with water bubbled in response to the passage of an electric current, demonstrating the principle of hydrogen, electrolysis. Further on, a group of friends were intertwining and twisting around a pair of ropes that they were all holding, creating and undoing various types of knots that represented numbers (with each movement of the group being equivalent to an arithmetic operation). To everyone’s amazement, when they performed a movement that forced the result to zero, the ‘calculator’ made of knotted ropes returned the predicted value by undoing all the knots effortlessly.

Sofia thought it was “incredible”. The 12th grade student from Braga came along with João Pedro to “get to know the atmosphere” at Técnico. She likes science but says she’s more interested in the arts or humanities, which didn’t stop her from attending the Open Day. “I think it’s important to listen to other students’ experiences even if it’s about an area of study we’re not interested in”, she explained. “I had a lot of fun”, she added. She emphasised the shock she got during a static electricity experiment. “It was fun,” she said laughing. She added that she sees Técnico as a “very good school, even at international level”.

João Pedro wants to be a programmer for some years. “I study in Braga and was interested in changing my social environment a little. I really liked to talk to students from here”, he explains. “I spoke with a Computer Engineering student at the entrance and it was very good for convincing me that coming here is the right choice”, he added. “Hearing the testimony of students in person, at the campus, is something that makes all the difference – coming to the Open Day makes all the difference.”

Apart from the science fair, there’s everything else

The programme also included talks about ChatGPT’s impact on society and space exploration (the latter with particular reference to Técnico’s ISTSat-1, which stands out as the first university satellite entirely developed and manufactured in Portugal), led by Luisa Coheur and João Paulo Monteiro.

While waiting for one of these talks to begin, Catarina Cruz watched from the first floor of the Main Building dozens of people attending the activities in the atrium below – the information sessions led by Técnico students who described their experiences and their study programmes. “I’m pleased and amazed at how focused some of the secondary school students in the audience seem to be”, she says. “Maybe they’re much more open to this kind of initiative than they would have been in my generation, so that they can better decide on their professional future”, she added. As for herself, she came to Técnico Open Day because she found it “interesting to see the applicability of things that seem far away from us and that are shaping our daily lives, so this link between science and the community is the most important thing to minimise the distance that exists [between the two]”, she said.

On the ground floor, Tomás, Leonor and Sofia wait between two information sessions. The group explains what brought them to Técnico. According to Tomás, who is interested in Biomedical Engineering, “it’s one of the best schools for graduate employability that prepares its students for the job market”. Leonor, who is interested in Aerospace Engineering, emphasises that the three friends want to start their studies in engineering, as this is “a very prestigious school [in this area]”.

Outside, in front of the Main Building, several Técnico students held up posters signalling the meeting points for guided tours of the school’s laboratories. In one of these visits, participants saw a jet of red foam ejected from an Erlenmeyer flask after a reaction to produce a substance similar to ‘elephant toothpaste’. They could also observe the cooling properties of liquid nitrogen (stored at around minus 200ºC), forming ‘glasses’ made of ice and shattering leaves previously dipped in the substance as if they were made of glass.

Lara was already familiar with some of the laboratories, as she took part in the ULisboa summer activities. Her father and brother studied at Técnico, so she confesses that she “really likes Técnico” and that the school is “very prestigious”. Madalena, a friend she came with, wanted to get to know the people and facilities, and signed up for visits related to physics.

Even the youngest had activities dedicated to them. In room C9, there was ‘‘Ciência dos Pequeninos’ (‘Science for the Little Ones’), with games that got the children thinking about science, making slime and drawing scientists as they saw them (Silvestre, aged 6, drew a robot scientist). Perhaps in the future some of these little visitors will walk these corridors again, on their way to becoming the engineers and scientists they drew years before on this Open Day.