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MinTU - Girls at TU Dortmund University

MinTU mentees discover architecture, civil engineering and computer science up close!

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© TU Dortmund University​/​Timmreck
The first workshop day in MinTU Year 2025 took place for the students and their mentors on March 14 in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering and the Department of Computer Science.

In the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, everything revolved around building towers. The participants first explored the requirements that a tower must fulfill in order to grow stably upwards. Equipped with paper and glue, they built creative and unusual constructions. The structures were then tested for their load-bearing capacity and evaluated. It turned out that the girls developed impressive towers with a lot of creativity, intuition and team spirit. "I already knew about architecture, but I had no idea what civil engineering was," said one mentee, summing up the workshop. The workshop was rounded off with an exciting tour of the faculty and insights into studying.

In the computer science workshop, the students immersed themselves in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The mentees quickly summarized that these topics are part of our everyday lives: "Netflix, Alexa and ChatGPT are artificial intelligences that we use in everyday life."
An interactive event with practical insights awaited them during their visit to the Lamarr Institute. After a short introduction, they were able to get active themselves: As animal experts, they analyzed the mood of monkeys, horses and cows, and on a mycological excursion they transformed themselves into mushroom experts. Using a neural network, they found out which mushrooms are edible - and which are better not to eat.

The hands-on workshops impressively demonstrated how interesting and varied the STEM subjects are.