On July 1st the 17th edition of Universidade Júnior kicked off, attracting thousands of young people from the north and south of the country, the islands and abroad. For one or more weeks, they will take part in countless discovery activities that will allow them to experience the academic environment and socialise with university students, recent graduates, young researchers and professors.
At DEI, through the coordination of the ACM FEUP student group and the supervision of professors Pedro Diniz and André Restivo, 99 young secondary school students (10th and 11th grades) will be welcomed over the 4 weeks of July.
In each of the 4 weeks, the young students will be accompanied by 4 monitors from the ACM FEUP student group, with the aim of introducing the participants to computational thinking and programming. Participants will start by working with block programming and then move on to programming in Python. With this knowledge, they will be able to programme a robot, create a game, build an object recognition application and learn more about various areas of computer science, such as the web and AI.
But the monitors haven’t forgotten that the young participants are on holiday and, as Filipe Correia, ACM FEUP’s president, shared, many extra activities are being prepared, such as escape rooms, board games, treasure hunts and icebreaker initiatives to promote group work and interpersonal skills. At the end of each IT project, they will be encouraged to give short presentations to reinforce this same objective.
This activity, now in its second edition, has become one of the signature activities of the ACM FEUP student group, allowing students from secondary schools to experience the university environment in a relaxed and informal setting.