EPFL Summer school: An electrifying experience!

© 2021 EPFL - Nearly 130 high school students chose to kick-start their summer by taking part in the summer schools held on the EPFL campus. These pre-college sessions are run every year by the Education Outreach Department, which works closely with a number of partners to give students a unique opportunity to discover EPFL and to develop additional skills in science and engineering. For students with a passion for the sciences, there were plenty of EPFL Summer Schools sessions to pick from. With courses on general relativity, mobile robotics, scientific programming, simulations of behavior of matter, and truth tables, it wasn't an easy choice to make! Regardless of the field they chose, the Summer Schools helped participants to create a clear link between theory and practice, in particular through group projects and unique experiences, such as a visit to the CROCUS experimental nuclear reactor, which was arranged during the general relativity week. I already knew a bit about theory, but the Summer School gave me the concrete mathematical concepts I needed to refine my understanding. Alongside the math week, which looked at the sorts of truth tables used to help calculators run, the students had the incredible opportunity to take part in building a giant calculator made from dominoes, using around 3500 of them to create a structure including OR, AND, and XOR logic gates. The material covered during the Summer Schools is complex and the courses are intensive.