Year 10 pupils from Sankt Gertrudis Ellwangen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer Schule Schwäbisch G münd have now completed their school project "Smart Green Home" with a visit to Aalen University of Applied Sciences. In the Field of Study Mechatronics and Engineering Education, they gained a wide range of insights into modern technologies and were able to interact with a robot.
The visit to the institution of higher education was preceded by the "Smart Green Home" school project of the Field of Study Mechatronics and Engineering Education. Under the Management of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Höfig and Prof. Dr. Lukas Amadeus Schachner as well as the teaching staff Anton Gösele and Wolfgang Ebert, students from the Department worked with pupils from the NWT classes at the Sankt Gertrudis girls' school for a school semester to find answers to questions about how mechatronic components such as garage doors, locking and security systems and air conditioning elements work. The learning content was implemented in an action-oriented way by replicating and programming various everyday functions with Electronics components, for example with microcontrollers from Arduino.
The degree of the school project was marked by the "University Day" at the institution of higher education in Aalen. After welcoming the pupils and accompanying teachers, they set off for three workshops. Professor Dr. Holger Schmidt explained how artificial intelligence works using the example of image recognition and made it clear that an AI can only ever be as good as the data provided to it. The students were then able to create their own artificial intelligence with the help of a teachable machine.
In the Field of Study Human Centricity, Prof. Dr. Constance Richter worked with the students to identify the barriers that can affect people in old age. Using an age simulation suit, special shoes, vests and glasses, visual impairments and physical deficits were made tangible. The target group-oriented design of Information also helps to break down barriers in everyday life for the benefit of people.
In the field (of) Mechatronics, Professor Dr. Markus Glück presented the role robots play in everyday life, how they are constructed and function and what other tasks they could take on in the future. In the laboratory / lab, the "young researchers" experienced individual functions of an industrial robot and computer-controlled illustration by a robot. They were also allowed to operate the robot arm controls themselves and learned a lot about the performance and safety of robots in industrial production.
The special subject NWT (Natural Sciences and Technology) at grammar school includes topics such as Energy and Mobility or Information Acquisition and Processing and thus offers pupils the opportunity to experience specialist knowledge from the natural sciences in an application-oriented way. This aim was successfully implemented on this "University Day", which was attended by almost 90 schoolgirls, as could be seen from the satisfied faces at the end of the event (general). The institution of higher education makes an important contribution to appointment funding for professors; appointment funds through its collaboration, cooperation with schools and the continuation, follow-up of teaching content in an academic environment. The collaboration, cooperation with St. Gertrudis in Ellwangen will be further developed and continued in the 2025/26 school year.
