Arduino tutorial organized by Young Minds Section Aveiro

Posted on 22/05/202022/05/2020 by Richard Zeltner

The Young Minds Section in Aveiro has organized a seminar on Arduino programming. Photo credit: YM Section Aveiro

This February the Young Minds Section of Aveiro has organized and hosted a course on Arduino programming. It was held by two local students of the Electronic, Telecommunication and Informatic Department (DETI) of the University of Aveiro. In four sessions, each 2 hours long, the participants were introduced in several topics concerning the electronic prototyping platform Arduino. The course attracted nineteen participants from different departments, and each of them received a kit with electronic components, necessary to learn and develop the Arduino projects proposed by the teachers. At the end of the course, each participant could keep the kit to themselves and continue to learn and test the new knowledge acquired. The course can be certainly considered a success, as it did not only enhance the knowledge of the participants, but also strengthened the connection of the Aveiro sections to other organizations from University of Aveiro.

Scientific Poster Competition

Posted on 12/07/201816/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

At the end of the academic second semester, a poster contest was made in our department. The timing of this activity was well thought since the presentation of the bachelor projects and master thesis was just around the corner. This would promote an interest in the ongoing projects of the students. The main objective of this contest is the improvement of the writing and oral capabilities of the students, which will be shown important in future conferences that they might participate. Being this said, the activity was conducted for students participating in bachelor or master courses, being extended to students attending the 1st year doctoral program.

In a first phase was asked for a small abstract of the presented project, and later the poster version. These were printed by our section and, later, delivered to the students. If the number of abstracts shown itself relatively high for our budget a selection of the best abstracts would be performed. We were granted with 10 posters, where only one was from a student doing the bachelor project at the same time. Most of the other posters were from master thesis, bachelor projects or individual work for a course. These covered different areas, since applied physics, theoretical physics and oceanography. Being the later the less abundant, with only one poster. We were still, very praised with the number of interested students.

The jury panel was composed of researchers from different fields of study, since applied physics to theoretical physics, is in accordance with the expected submitted posters. It was decided that the judges should select the criteria for the nomination of the three best posters. The scheme of the presentation was also decided by the judges, were the contestants should present their work in 3 minutes, followed by some questions from the judges. The presentation was realized on the 6th of June. These were placed in the atrium of the physics department, this way every person that would enter the place would see them. This attracted a lot of attention, due to the quality of the poster itself and due to the place where they were posted. The placement was made one day before the presentations so that the number of interested people would increase.
This attracted a really good audience, since students to professors, on the day of the presentation. After the presentation a coffee break was realized for all the people involved in this activity. The three best prizes were from Physical Engineering students. The first prize winner was given to Nuno Caçoilo, a student from the 1st year of the master degree, with its bachelor project, under the title Tuning the magnetic anisotropy in perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (pMTJ) by means of ion irradiation.

The second prize was given to Bohdan Kulyk, a student on its 1st year of the doctoral program, under the name CVD Graphene for Electrochemical Biosensing: Synthesis, Characterisation and Device Fabrication. The third, and last prize was given to Liliana Sousa, a student doing its master thesis (from which the poster was about) under the portuguese theme Emissor ótico recongurável para Lidar. Being this poster presentation the first experience for most of the students we are glad with the ideas and constructive commentaries of the jury panel. We expect that next year the numbers of students will be larger since their bachelor project and master thesis is already concluded.

Contest of Experiences

Posted on 12/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

The purpose of this contest was to explore the creativity of the students in our Physics Department, from the Bachelor and Masters degrees. Due to the diversity of study fields in our Department, there was expected different kinds of projects and ideas.
This activity was made in association with the Show da Física, a show well known in our University and region, designed to spread the beauty of physics through entertaining experiments and demonstrations in, usually, high schools and for incoming students, not only for the ones pursuing this field of study. One of our objectives with this activity was the possible integration of an experiment in their show. Therefore, some requisites were made.
The experiences should be designed to be adaptable to be made in a classroom. Also, the understanding of the physical phenomena should be such that a high schooler would understand it.
The contest was designed in three different phases. In a first phase the contestants should deliver a brief report explaining their idea (mainly, which physical phenomena were behind it), the necessary materials for its execution and the budget. Our section contributed with a budget for the construction of the experiments.
In this phase 3 students decided to participate. These were from different years of study and their ideas were from different areas.
The topics of the ideas were diverse. One from electromagnetism, where the student made a Tesla coil and tried to explain its functioning. Other from hydrodynamics, were the Bernoulli principle was put into practice. And the last from robotics, were the student crafted a small drone with movement sensors.
Even though only three people decided to participate in this contest, the Show da Física personal was really excited, since the interest of undergraduate students in their show was absent until the date.
After a time of roughly 2 months, the students had to present an experiment that explained their idea. This presentation was made public in the 2nd of May. The jury panel was composed of our president and the professors responsible for the Show da Física. In order to evaluate the di􏰀erent contestants, the judges classified the idea, explanation and execution of such idea components.
The public appearance was higher than expected, where more than 40 students appeared to support their colleagues. In the end a coffee break was made for the people involved in the activity.
We expect that some people who appeared in the presentation are interested to do their own experiment next year, so the continuation of this activity is of great importance. Also, the Show da Física was very pleased and offered motivation for future activities of the same genre. The experience of the Bernoulli principle is thought to compose one of their future presentations.

Computational Physics Course

Posted on 12/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

Taking into consideration the success of our last theoretical course about General Relativity, lectured by professor Carlos Herdeiro, we opted to embark on other course given by a lecturer from the same research group (Gr@v).
Motivated by our colleagues who wanted to learn Python, we asked professor Valério Ribeiro, a researcher at Gr@v, to give some lectures about how to solve physics problems in that programming language.
The course, which was named Computational Physics, took place from the 8th of March until the 7th of June, once a week, during the afternoon.
In the initial sessions, the professor taught the basics of the Python language, which is incredibly useful in Physics. Each lecture had the duration of 1 hour and a half. After an initial presentation of the methods and the algorithms we were going to use, the sessions were spent solving exercises on personal computers.
The initial attendance exceeded our expectations, registering a surprising number of 33 students, from most of the courses lectured in the Department and even some alumni. These students were allocated in all years of studies, from the 1st year to the 5th year.
Even though the number of students decreased with the number of lectures (as expected), a reasonable number of students stayed, which made the lecturer – student relation more informal.
In the end of the course a certificate (with a template given by EPS) was gave to the students. Each one had the handwritten signatures of the president of our section and the lecturer, Valério Ribeiro, to whom we are thankful for sharing his knowledge with the students.
The feedback of our courses is positive and we intend on continuing on doing them next year.

Optics at your School and Open Week @UA

Posted on 22/06/201522/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

The Aveiro YM Section realized an activity for Schools divided in two events: visits to schools in Aveiro region and the participation in the Week of Science at the University of Aveiro. This was what we have done and we keep doing nowadays.

First, we have visited a high school in Águeda (Aveiro) and presented some Physics concepts together with experimental demonstrations. The students targeted were from the 11st grade and shown great interest in the experiments and greatly thanked our visit. Contrary to some cases, these students really got involved in the activities and due to that we think they have learned many things. We considered this a very fruitful visit, were we gained also experience in presenting for large audiences.

We have also participated in the Week of Science at the University of Aveiro, where we organized a great event for more than 10 schools, which visited us. In total, we reached more than 300 students from different levels. During one week, we have organized 6 sessions, each one having about 50 students. Students came from schools from all Aveiro region. In these sessions, we have presented many Physics concepts, both theoretically and experimentally. The students participated in the experiments themselves and have shown great interest in everything. We consider this an excellent activity, which we intend to repeat this year with more experiments.

We highlight that all members of our Section participated in the sessions and this was also good for the strength of the Section.

Meanwhile, we plan to continue visits to schools.

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