School class visits the RZ

21 March 2007

On March 20th a school class of the Freies Gymnasium Zürich paid a visit to the Department of Computer Science. 33 kids, aged 13 to 15 seized the opportunity of spending two hours at the RZ building gaining insight into the world of computer science.

Katja Abrahams on this interesting morning in the RZ building

The flying visit started with a short presentation on "Computers Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" by Luca Previtali, head of the IT Support Group, including the inspection of the super computers Cray and Lilith. The latter received on this occasion a place of honor in front of the computer science library. Afterwards, Ruedi Arnold, PhD student at the Institute for Pervasive Computing, explained in his talk "What is Computer Science?", that computer science means much more than Word, Excel and hardware.

After a well-deserved coffee break some CS students presented in a mini-fair current research projects which had already been showcased in 2006 during the department's 25th anniversary exhibition "The World between 0 and 1" and at several high schools during the itinerant exhibition "ETH on the road".

At 10:30 am sharp the young visitors had to leave in order not to miss their next class. Despite the brief stay the kids enjoyed what they had seen: "What I liked best is the knight’s castle with the interactive toys. I really did not know that you do such cool things in computer science", one 14-year-old said enthusiastically.

Math teacher Silvia Hesse, who had been "really fascinated" by her visit with a school class to the "World between 0 and 1" last October was also highly satisfied: "At our school we currently only teach the students how to use a computer. Therefore, today’s visit was very interesting for us and I could imagine coming back with other classes in the future."